Quantitative Methods; Descriptive Tools and Approaches

This course is about the descriptive tools and approaches used in quantitative methods in business. The course is aimed at anyone of the following groups.

1. Bachelor's taking course on  ‘Quantitative Methods’ or ‘Quantitative Methods in Business’ (200 to 300 level courses);

2. Professional examinations offering similar courses in Quantitative Methods, including CIMA BA1 and CFA Level 1;

3. Business managers; and

4. Anyone interested in learning Quantitative Methods

The descriptive tools and approaches covered in this course are absolutely essential for anyone pursuing further studies in quantitative methods and students will gain a good understanding of these concepts and their application in a business context. These descriptive tools and approaches taught in this course are also of value to business managers as these are often used in day-to-day business decision making.

Furthermore, the descriptive tools and approaches are explained using Excel/Spreadsheets, and therefore this course is of much practical value to students and business managers alike.

The courses cover the following topics:

Section 1 - Introduction to quantitative methods

• What is quantitative data?

• Quantitative methods and business decision making

• Presentation of quantitative data

Section 2 - Descriptive tool and approaches

- Diagrams

• Frequency distribution and grouped data

• Bar charts and pie charts

• Historgram and ogive

(Section 1 & 2 relevant for CIMA BA1 - C. Informational Context of Business (Learning Outcome 1)

Section 3 - Measure of location

• Mean for ungrouped and grouped data

• Median for ungrouped and grouped data

• Mode for ungrouped and grouped data

• Comparison of mean, median and mode

Section 4 - Measure of spread

• Range

• Inter-quartile range for ungrouped and grouped data

• Mean absolute deviation for ungrouped and grouped data

• Variance and standard deviation for ungrouped and grouped data

• Skewness

(Section 3 & 4 relevant for CFA Level 1 Quantitative Methods - Descriptive Statistics)

The lecture videos include a comprehensive explanation of the concepts and calculation of the descriptive tools and approaches using Excel for business examples. In addition, students taking this course will receive downloadable power point presentations of the topics covered.