BA- Session I & II (Group F)

Session I & II- Business Analytics

In the introductory classes of Business Analytics we were familiarized with various basics and fundamentals of using the software package – SPSS.

Through understanding the ways of using the SPSS software, we were also made to understand some concepts and statistical tools and how they could be “analyzed” to gain better insight into the subject at hand (as opposed to just processing the data).

The first fundamental explained was the concept of variables:

The next concept was of data:

Data can be:

1. Nominal: only for name sake. One has the freedom to assign any number to a variable. Eg: gender – I can make Male & Female 1&2 or 5&6 or 4&5 or anything. Eg: nos. on the back of player jerseys. Eg: cell phone nos. 

2. Ordinal: shows order (eg if you’re showing order of education. Can be 1234 or 4321 but needs to show order). Eg: Designation (Pres, VP, Asst…etc.)

3. Scale: Somewhere one can tell the EXACT magnitude of difference between two observations. Time, distance.

Classification of techniques:

1. 1^st level analysis: frequencies, cross-tabs, OLAP cubes

2^nd level analysis: multi-variate techniques

2. Univariate – use/ show only one variable at a time. Pie chart (various values of the same variable) A pie chart can be bivariate if one bring thickness of the pie into the picture.

Bivariate – correlation, t-test

Multivariate – bubble diagram

More the no. of variables, more insight can be gained.

Finally we completed an exercise using our knowledge of the above concepts and the basics of SPSS to begin proving a hypothesis for a given set of data.

From this a few pointers that emerged were:

a)      In cross-tabs: Null Hypothesis always same ie – “No relation between the two variables under consideration”

b)      Check significance value in chi-square table. If that number is less than .05 there is a significant relationship between the variables and therefore we reject the null hypo.

By

Urvashi Singh

SIBM Bangalore

14057