Gen Maths Introduction

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INTRODUCTION

BASIC CONCEPTS OF GENERAL MATHEMATICS

General Mathematics can simply be defined as the collection, presentation and analysis of
data so as to help managers in decision making. It is a useful tool in transforming masses of
raw data into meaningful and usable information for decision making purposes.
It should be understood that business decisions have costs associated with them, thus such
important decision making processes should not be based on personal opinion but on data.
How then does data help in making sound decisions? This is where business statistics comes
in handy, that is, data has to be collected first, presented on various display methods and then
analyzed so that it communicate with us. In light of the above, what the data will be
conveying (interpretation) is what is important as an aid to effective and sound business
decision making.
It must be noted and appreciated at this juncture that business statistics is not meant to simply
plug figures into formulas and getting answers but to correctly interpret the meanings of those
answers, so that business decisions can then be made based on them.
One important aspect underlying the usage of business data to make decisions is that the data
must have been collected according to a well developed plan if valid information is to be
obtained from it, otherwise, Garbage In, Garbage Out, that is, if one collects wrong data for
decision making purposes, it follows that the decision (outcome) to be made will also be
wrong if not disastrous.

Since most, if not all, business decisions have decision deadlines (time limits) against a
background of large volumes of required data, sampling is normally used to manage such
hindrances, so that decision deadlines are met. Sampling is whereby a representative subset of
the entire group of things or objects is used to represent the entire group. Therefore, another
important aspect of business statistics is the ability to make inferences (generalizations) about
certain characteristics of a population based on information contained in a random sample of
that population.

While business statistics cannot replace the knowledge and experience of the decision maker,
it is a valuable tool that managers can employ to assist in the decision making process in order
to reduce significant risk in business decisions.

Common General Mathematics Terms

Just like any other profession, statisticians have their own key words and phrases to ease
communication. However, despite the availability of these key terms, one must interpret the
results of any statistical process in a language that is easy for the decision maker to
understand, otherwise, the decision maker will not be convinced by what you recommend and
therefore does not go into implementation stage. This lack of communication between
statisticians and managers is the major blockade for using statistics.

Population: it is the entirety of all things or objects that the statistician wishes to describe or
about which, he wishes to draw conclusions for example all students at a college represents
the student population at the particular college.

Sample: A sample on the other hand is only a part or sub-set of the entire population for
example students from one department/division represents a sample of the entire student body.
However one major attribute of a good sample is that it must be representative, that is, it must
represents a cross section of the population from which it has been drawn for it to be usable.

Variable: This is a phenomenon or an observable thing, which can take different values, such
as weight, height or shoe size since they are different from individual to individual.

Randomness: Means unpredictability.

Experiment: An experiment is a process whose outcome is not known in advance with


certainty.

Primary Data: This is data obtained from a planned experiment of a statistical investigation.
It is data collected for a specific purpose.

Secondary Data: This is data used for some other purpose other than its original purpose.
Statisticians sometimes make use of such data.

Statistic: A statistic is a quantity that is calculated from sample data. It is used to give
information about unknown values in the corresponding population.

Parameter: A parameter is an unknown value of a population, therefore it has to be


estimated from sample results (statistics).

Descriptive Statistics: These are statistical tools, which are used to quickly obtain the
essential characteristics of a set of data in order to incorporate them into decision making
process. They merely describe the data set.

Statistical Inference: This refers to the process of using sample results (statistics) to draw
conclusion about the population from which the sample has been drawn. Therefore statistical
inference allows us to make generalizations about a particular population by using results of
sample drawn from that population (inductive reasoning).
Types of Data

Data collected in statistics can either be qualitative or quantitative. Qualitative data is the type
of data that do not vary in magnitude in successive observations such as skin colour of a
group of individuals. Essentially, they are labels that tell us the category or class an individual
or object falls into, thus they are called categorical variables. The values from qualitative data
are known as attributes. Attributes are not computable by arithmetic relations.

Quantitative data, on the other hand, vary in size in successive observations. It consists of
measures that take numerical values for which descriptions such as means and standard
deviations can be obtained/computed. The values of quantitative variables are known as
variates. Quantitative data can further be divided into two groups, i.e. Discrete or Continuous
data.

Discrete data is data that can take only whole numbers (integers), thus a discrete random
variable cannot possibly exists as a fractional unit for example the number of passes in class
or number of car arrivals at service station in an hour. Note that the above examples can only
be whole numbers not fractions.

Continuous Data, as the name implies, this type of data can take any value i.e. whole
numbers, fractions or a mixture of both whole numbers and fractions. Therefore variables that
are referred to as continuous are measured continuously on the measuring scale for example
weight of workers at a company can 40, 44.7, 54, 62.8 kilograms.

An important point to note is that data for both continuous and discrete random variables can
be presented as either ungrouped or grouped depending on the size of the data set as well as
objectives of the analyst.

Ungrouped (raw) data is when we have a set of individual values representing each
observation in that data set. It is the original state of numerical data, for example, the
following ungrouped data shows the time taken, in minutes, to serve twenty clients of a
particular insurance company:

21, 27, 29, 24, 22, 34, 30, 20, 42, 47, 35, 33, 28, 31, 33, 37, 46, 37, 38 & 34

The above is a typical example of raw or ungrouped data. The major drawback of ungrouped
data is that it is difficult to analyse especially if the variables are too many, for instance, two
hundred observations. In addition raw data is difficult to present on many display methods.

In light of the above drawbacks, grouped data becomes handy as it can overcome the above
weaknesses. Grouped data is data arranged into established, numerically ordered class

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