Course: Data Analytics for Decision Making: An Introduction to Using Excel

What is a random variable? It’s just a variable where the outcome or value is uncertain. That isn’t to say that you have no idea what the value will be, …

Hopefully this video’s example will help to reinforce where our formulas come from. Without using a formula, Adrian can calculate the desired probability through common sense. The intuition displayed in …

We should now have a broad understanding of the different ways we can assign probabilities to events as well as what those probabilities mean. You’ll likely most often be working …

In the last activity we discussed how we assign probabilities to simple events. In this video we look at how we can take these simple events and work out probabilities …

In this video, Adrian discusses the basic building blocks of probability as well as why it’s important to understand the concept of probability. Some terminology is also introduced so that …

Building on the last video, Adrian here continues to highlight the importance of ethics in analytics, especially with relation to graphical techniques. Throughout this course we’ve already talked about what …

In this video, Adrian speaks about why we need to consider ethics in our analysis, provides a list of of principles to consider, and gives examples of unethical analysis. Why …

In this video we have provided a new measure, demonstrated it’s calculation, and summarised our statistics. Our new measure of correlation is useful for determining whether there is a linear …

We’ve now covered various descriptive statistics, and now you should also be able to calculate them yourselves using Excel. Note that while most common statistics can be produced automatically using …

We introduce the idea of ‘skewness’ in this video. Skewness tells us about the symmetry of the distribution of data. Skewness of 0 means that the data is perfectly symmetric, …

What makes a good graph? It’s easy to spot a bad graph. I’m sure everyone has seen graphs before that only made the data more confusing. A quick search will …

We now have our last two plots. Line plots are valuable tools for visualising how a variable changes across time and is one of the most common plots you will …

Interpreting Standard Deviation Standard deviation is an important measure of spread because of how it can be interpreted for data that is approximately bell-shaped. Specifically, it gives an indication of …

Measures of Spread Variance and standard deviation are the most common measures of how spread out data is. While the range of the data is also a measure of spread, …

While pie and bar charts are useful for visualising data where only a few values are possible (such as hair colours or product names), we need a different tool for …