BCOR 2020 Midterm
Business Problems - ANSHow much to produce, How much to buy, When to open the store,
What products to promote?
Decision making types - ANSStrategic decisions, Tactical (managerial) decisions, and
operational decisions
Strategic decisions - ANSA decision that involves higher-level issues and that is concerned with
the overall direction of the organization, defining the overall goals and aspirations for the
organization's future.
Tactical (Managerial) decisions - ANSA decision concerned with how the organization should
achieve the goals and objectives set by its strategy.
operational decisions - ANSA decision concerned with how the organization is run from day to
day.
Decision Making Process - ANSIdentify and define the problem, Determine the criteria,
Determine the set of alternative solutions, Evaluate the alternatives, and Choose an alternative
What are examples of business decisions? - ANSLoan Processing, Amazon: what products to
recommend?, Airline ticket prices, medical diagnosis
Decision making - ANSIt is the responsibility of managers to plan, coordinate, organize and lead
their organizations to better performance.
Common Approaches to decision making - ANSTradition, Intuition, Rules of thumb, using
relevant data
Challenges of Decision making - ANSUncertainties, and enormous number of alternatives
Business Analytics (BA) - ANSthe scientific process of transforming data into insights for making
better decision
What are the three categories of business analytics? - ANSDescriptive, Predictive, and
Prescriptive
Descriptive analytics - ANSEncompasses the set of techniques that describes what has
happened in the past
, Examples of descriptive analytics - ANSData queries, Reports, Descriptive statistics, Data
visualization (including data dashboards), Data-mining techniques,Basic what-if spreadsheet
models.
Predictive Analytics - ANSConsists of techniques that use models constructed from past data to
predict the future or ascertain the impact of one variable on another.
Prescriptive Analytics - ANSIndicates a best course of action to take: Provide a forecast or
prediction, but do not provide a decision.A forecast or prediction, when combined with a rule,
becomes a prescriptive model.
Rule-based models - ANSPrescriptive models that rely on a rule or set of rules
What is data? - ANSthe facts and figures collected, analyzed, and summarized for presentation
and interpretation.
Variable - ANSA characteristic or a quantity of interest that can take on different values; such as
Symbol, Industry, Share Price, and Volume.
Observation - ANSa set of values corresponding to a set of variables
Variation - ANSthe difference in a variable measured over observations (time, customers, items,
etc.)
Random (uncertain) variable - ANSa quantity whose values are not known with certainty
descriptive statistics - ANSstatistics that summarize the data collected in a study
Types of Data - ANSPopulation, sample (includes random), Quantitative, categorical,
cross-sectional, and time series
Population Data - ANSThe set of all elements of interest in a particular study.
Sample Data - ANSdata collected from a subset of the population
random sampling - ANSCollecting a sample that ensures that (1) each element selected comes
from the same population and (2) each element is selected independently.
Quantitative data - ANSData for which numerical values are used to indicate magnitude, such
as how many or how much. Arithmetic operations such as addition, subtraction, and
multiplication can be performed on quantitative data.
Categorical data - ANSData for which categories of like items are identified by labels or names.
Arithmetic operations cannot be performed on categorical data.