Statistics

Introduction

This is a fundamental course in statistics and forms a mandatory component of the bachelor’s programmes in economics and business administration. The course provides an introduction to statistical thinking, including basic probability theory and core statistical methods for data analysis. Statistics constitutes an important tool for analysis and decision support within economics and business administration, and the course provides a foundation for further studies in areas such as econometrics and data analysis.

Course content

• Data collection. Variables and levels of measurement.
• Descriptive statistics: measures of central tendency, measures of dispersion, covariance, and graphical representations.
• Basic probability theory: the concept of probability, outcomes and sample spaces, events, and probability models.
• Combinatorics and probability calculus. Conditional probability.
• Random variables. Expectation, variance, and covariance.
• Core probability distributions, with particular emphasis on the indicator distribution (Bernoulli distribution), the binomial distribution, the hypergeometric distribution, the normal distribution, and the t-distribution. Joint distribution for two discrete random variables.
• Estimators and estimation. Sampling distributions and the central limit theorem. Confidence intervals.
• Hypothesis testing, including tests for means and proportions, as well as comparisons of means and proportions in two groups.
• Simple linear regression, including inference in the form of confidence intervals and hypothesis tests for the regression parameters.
• Ethical issues related to the collection, analysis, and communication of statistical data, including data protection, representativeness, and responsible interpretation of results.
• Active use of statistical software.

Disclaimer

This is an excerpt from the complete course description for the course. If you are an active student at BI, you can find the complete course descriptions with information on eg. learning goals, learning process, curriculum and exam at portal.bi.no. We reserve the right to make changes to this description.