QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS IN BUSINESS

Chapter 2

Population: Includes all objects of interest in a study (e.g. people households machines, etc.).
Sample: Representative subset of population, usually chosen randomly.
Variable (or field): Attribute or measurement of members of a population, such as height, gender or salary.
Observation (or record or case): List of all variable values for a single member of the population.
Data set: (Usually) a rectangular array of data, with variable in columns, observation in rows, and variable names
on the top row.
Data type: Several categorization are possible: numerical vs. categorical, discrete vs. continuous, cross-sectional
vs. time series; categorical can be nominal or ordinal.
Dummy variable: A variable coded 1 or 0: 1 for observations in a category, 0 for observations not in the category.
Binned (or discretized) variable: Numerical variables that has been categorized into discrete categories called
bins.
Count of categories: Numbers of observations in various categories (COUNTIF function)
StatTools: Palisade add-in for data analysis in Excel (StatTools ribbon)
Mean: Average of observations (AVERAGE or StatTools)
Median: Middle observation after sorting (MEDIAN or StatTools)
Mode: Most frequent observation (MODE)
Percentiles: Values that have specified percentages of observations below them (PERCENTILE or StatTools)
Quartiles: Values that have 25%, 50%, or 75% of observations below them (QUARTILE or StatTools)
Minimum: Smallest observation (MIN or StatTools)
Maximum: Largest observation (MAX or StatTools)
Concatenate: String together two or more pieces of text (& character (or CONATENATE))
Range: Difference between largest and smallest observations (MAX, MIN, or StatTools)
Interquartile range (IQR): Difference between first and third quartiles (QUARTILE functions or StatTools)
Variance: Measure of variability; essentially the average of squared deviation from the mean (VAR (or VARP) or
StatTools)
Standard deviation: Measure of variability in the same units as observations; square root of variance (STDEV (or
STDEVP) or StatTools)
Empirical rules: Rules that specify approximate percentage observations within one, two, or three standard
deviations of mean for bell-shaped distribution
Mean absolute Deviation (MAD): Another measure of variability in same units as observations; square root of
variance (AVEDEV or StatTools)
Skewness: When one tail of the distribution is longer than the other (SKEW or StatTools)
Kurtosis: Measure of “fatness” of tails of a distribution (KURT or StatTools)

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Histogram: Chart of bin counts of a numerical variable; shows shape of distribution (StatTools)
Frequency table: Contains counts of observations in specified categories (COUNTIF or FREQUENCY)
Box plots: Alternative chart that shows the distribution of a numerical variable (StatTools)
Time series graph: Graph showing behavior through time of one or more time series variables (StatTools)
Outlier: Observation that lies outside the general range of observations in a data set
Missing values: Values that are not reported in a data set
Excel tables: Rectangular ranges specified as tables; especially useful for sorting and filtering.