BCOR Midterm Exam Questions and Answers | Latest Update 2024 | Rated A+

Business Problems How much to produce, How much to buy, When to open the store, What products to promote? Decision making types Strategic decisions, Tactical (managerial) decisions, and operational decisions Strategic decisions A 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 A decision concerned with how the organization should achieve the goals and objectives set by its strategy. operational decisions A decision concerned with how the organization is run from day to day. BCOR Midterm Exam Questions and Answers | Latest Update 2024 | Rated A+ Decision Making Process Identify 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? Loan Processing, Amazon: what products to recommend?, Airline ticket prices, medical diagnosis Decision making It is the responsibility of managers to plan, coordinate, organize and lead their organizations to better performance. Common Approaches to decision making Tradition, Intuition, Rules of thumb, using relevant data Challenges of Decision making Uncertainties, and enormous number of alternatives Business Analytics (BA) the scientific process of transforming data into insights for making better decision What are the three categories of business analytics? Descriptive, Predictive, and Prescriptive Descriptive analytics Encompasses the set of techniques that describes what has happened in the past Examples of descriptive analytics Data queries, Reports, Descriptive statistics, Data visualization (including data dashboards), Data-mining techniques,Basic what-if spreadsheet models. Predictive Analytics Consists of techniques that use models constructed from past data to predict the future or ascertain the impact of one variable on another. Prescriptive Analytics Indicates 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 Prescriptive models that rely on a rule or set of rules What is data? the facts and figures collected, analyzed, and summarized for presentation and interpretation. Variable A characteristic or a quantity of interest that can take on different values; such as Symbol, Industry, Share Price, and Volume. Observation a set of values corresponding to a set of variables Variation the difference in a variable measured over observations (time, customers, items, etc.) Random (uncertain) variable a quantity whose values are not known with certainty descriptive statistics statistics that summarize the data collected in a study Types of Data Population, sample (includes random), Quantitative, categorical, crosssectional, and time series Population Data The set of all elements of interest in a particular study. Sample Data data collected from a subset of the population random sampling Collecting a sample that ensures that (1) each element selected comes from the same population and (2) each element is selected independently. Quantitative data Data 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 Data for which categories of like items are identified by labels or names. Arithmetic operations cannot be performed on categorical data. Cross-sectional data Data collected at the same or approximately the same point in time. time series data Data that are collected over a period of time (minutes, hours, days, months, years, etc.). Experimental Study a variable of interest is first identified. Then one or more other variables are identified and controlled or manipulated to obtain data about how these variables influence the variable of interest. Nonexperimental/Observational study makes no attempt to control the variables of interest. Sorting Data Enables you to organize data in a worksheet based on the values in the selected columns or rows. It makes data more readable. Filtering Data the process of displaying only records that meet specific conditions conditional formatting An Excel feature that enables you to specify how cells that meet one or more given conditions should be displayed. frequency distributions A tabular summary of data showing the number (frequency) of data values in each of several nonoverlapping bins. bins The nonoverlapping groupings of data used to create a frequency distribution. Bins for categorical data are also known as classes. relative frequency equals the fraction or proportion of items belonging to a class relative frequency of a bin equation frequency of the bin/ n percent frequency relative frequency multiplied by 100 relative frequency distribution A tabular summary of data showing the fraction or proportion of data values in each of several nonoverlapping bins. percent frequency distribution A tabular summary of data showing the percentage of data values in each of several nonoverlapping bins. Histogram A graphical presentation of a frequency distribution, relative frequency distribution, or percent frequency distribution of quantitative data constructed by placing the bin intervals on the horizontal axis and the frequencies, relative frequencies, or percent frequencies on the vertical axis. Skewness A measure of the lack of symmetry in a distribution. skewed left the tail to the left of the peak is longer than the tail to the right of the peak skewed right the tail to the right of the peak is longer than the tail to the left of the peak cumulative frequency distribution A tabular summary of quantitative data showing the number of data values that are less than or equal to the upper class limit of each bin. mean A measure of central location computed by summing the data values and dividing by the number of observations. Mode the most frequently occurring score(s) in a distribution Median A measure of central location provided by the value in the middle when the data are arranged in ascending order.