Probability in Week 2

Welcome to week 2! Last week you saw graphical techniques, descriptive statistics, and heard about ethics in analysis. This week will focus on how we can work with probability.

The key idea behind the content for this week is that in business and throughout life, we have to make decisions under uncertainty. These decisions can be as small as whether we bring an umbrella in case it rains to whether we invest in new technologies. Being able to work with this uncertainty in a structured way is a vital skill. We will start in the next two steps by introducing the idea of probability and talking about how we interpret probabilities.

In activity two, we’ll talk about how to calculate the probability of combinations of random events occurring. In activity three, we’ll introduce the idea of discrete random variables and how we can describe them with some familiar ideas. In activity four, we discuss how we can take our understanding of probability and random variables to make decisions even when outcomes are uncertain.

Activities one, two, three and four all relate to the primary goal for this week of being able to work with uncertainty. We also believe it’s important to finish the course with a broad discussion of today’s environment for data analytics. We live in an exciting time, where more and more data is being stored and there is more and more need for data analytics to help make sense of it. In activity five we will have the opportunity to hear about today’s environment from Bruce Vanstone, Professor of Data Science at Bond University.