Statistics for Business – I

Course Information

Course Length : 7 weeks
Estimated Effort : 2 – 4 hours per week

Statistics is a versatile discipline that has revolutionised the fields of business, engineering, medicine, and pure sciences. This IIMBx course Statistics for Business – I is Part 1 of the two-part series on Business Statistics and is ideal for learners who wish to enrol in business programs. These two courses cover topics in Descriptive Statistics. Spreadsheets containing real data from diverse areas such as economics, finance, and HR drive much of the discussions that are part of the course.

Statistics for Business – I explores the multiple ways to describe the aforementioned datasets, numerically as well as visually. It employed a problem-based approach to understanding the material: the primary reason to pick up a tool or a technique will be to solve a problem. The course also makes judicious use of the available tools for these explorations.

In the sequel to this course, i.e. Statistics for Business – II, participants shall take up a few datasets that have over a million rows, which makes it impossible to analyse using a spreadsheet. This forms a natural setting for R, an advanced statistical programming platform.

The courses incorporate helpful tutorials to get learners acquainted with both mechanisms. Participants will learn all these concepts with the help of various demonstrations that show their real-life application business-related situations.

Professor Shankar Venkatagiri

Course Instructor
Information Systems
Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB)

Full Profile

Course Syllabus

Week 1 - Introduction to course

• Introduction to the subject statistics
• Spreadsheet tutorial

Week 2 - Descriptive Statistics

• Sources of data
• Data preparation
• Summary statistics

Week 3 - Summarising Variables

• Variables and scales
• Summarising variables

Week 4 - Visualization Techniques

• Histograms
• Correlation
• Retail Demo

Week 5 - Numerical Data

• Skewness
• Kurtosis
• Boxplots

Week 6 - Probability

• Framework
• Joint and marginal
• Conditional

Week 7 - Bayes Theorem

• Bayes rule
• Decision tree

After completing this course, learners will be able to:

Analyse a dataset using spreadsheet software
Examine datasets to answer pertinent business questions
Clean up a dataset and summarise the data using single point measures of centrality and dispersion
Classify variables by scale and aggregate them with pivot tables
Explain probability, joint and marginal probability, conditional probability
Apply Bayes rule to invert probabilities on a decision tree

This course is designed from a business school perspective. The target audience for the course is diverse: you could be a practising manager, someone who has signed up for a course at college, an entrepreneur who wants to analyse business data, or just someone who wishes to have a deeper understanding of the subject.

“Well-structured course contents & a cheerful instructor. Was fun learning the basics of stats. Complex topics like Bayes rule etc. can be delved into deeper. Overall great experience.” – Miraj Vashi

“The Course is focused on learning to make sense of data through quantitative analysis. It teaches valuable skills on how to use excel effectively for to analyse data (mostly descriptive statistics). The course covers data cleaning, Pivot tables to summarize data, visual data representation using charts like bar charts, pie charts, histograms, box plots, scatter plots, bubble charts etc. all using excel. Case studies in between modules reinforce the concepts learned. Lecture videos are easy to follow and are very well organized. It was a lot of fun going through the course and I’d recommend it to everyone looking to learn how to work with data in practical situations with maximum productivity and understand how statistics can be put to work in real life situations.” – Manish Singh