Methods for Business Analysis and Forecasting: Text and Cases [With Disk]

By Peter Tryfos

This text is intended primarily for a one-semester or two-quarter elective course in methods or a required second statistics course at the upper undergraduate or graduate level for students of business or public administration. It can also be used for self-study by professionals. The text does not require more than high school mathematics.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0471123846
• ISBN13: 9780471123842
• Release Date: December 2005
• Publisher: Wiley
• Length: 592 Pages
• Weight: 2.73 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 7.7" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

practical and written with clarity

This is a practical book on forecasting and econometrics for beginners, what it teaches is meant to be applied. The book aims to be easily understood by a broad range of users: academics, professionals and self-learners at home. The mathematics used is not as extensive as in Gujarati's or Greene's books but still extensive enough in it proofs and theory to be of interest to those who know calculus. The book assumes you know some basic statistics. As for math, any first-year calculus course at uni/college, or books like Essential Mathematics for Economics and Business is enough. The contents of the book is (added comments are my own): 1. Introduction - what the book is all about in summary 2. regression - revision chapter for most people 3. inference in regression - confidence intervals etc. 4. attributes as explanatory variables - dummy variables etc. 5. nonlinear relationships - polynomials, inverse etc. 6. regression and time series - seasonal, moving averages etc. 7. lagged variables - geometric, stock adjustment model, distributed lags etc. 8. regression miscellanea - multicollinearity, experimental design etc. 9. more on inference in regression - nonlinearity, GLS, GLM etc. 10. autoregressive models - AR models, ARI, ARIMA, ARMA etc. 11. the classification problem - conditional probabilities etc. 12. more on classification - probability models, logit model etc. 13. models of systems - systems of equations etc. Cases Appendix: statistical essentials, mathematical notes As you can see 70% of the book covers what a standard course in econometrics would cover, the remaining 30% covers forecasting. When Tryfos introduces a concept he always uses case examples so you can see him use the techniques in practicality, there are many illustrations and graphs to further explain what he means. The language used in informal or non-academic/technical, you will understand him if you are not an academic or not particularly good at math or statistics. He seems very well aware that the reader is a beginner. The presentation is logical and straight-forward. There are many, many exercises for each chapter - far too many in opinion, but you can always skip a few...and they don't stray from what the chapter presented, so no unwelcome surprises. The excercises are both contextual, i.e. interpreting graphs, and technical. Some excercises will require a computer, others you can do with your graphical calculator. If I have to summarize the strengths of this book: > clarity in explanations <br />> many illustrative examples <br /> <br />The book will not teach you how to use any software, the graph and table printouts are predominantly from SAS, but there are few Excel screenshots here and there. <br /> <br />My book came with an old diskette, containing the data sets, which I couldn't use on my computer. I had to find someone with an old enough computer for me to save it on usb. <br /> <br />In the book it says to go to the Wiley website for the student

Quantitative Business Analysis Text and Cases

This is the best book I have ever studied in my business courses. The author has provided very useful information that teach the business students various modelling skills in a very user friendly manner.