Statistics in Business Decision Making Term Paper

Statistics in Business Decision Making - Term Paper Example As discussed in the introduction that this paper will attempt to describe statistical tools such as mean, standard deviation, variance etc. These statistical tools often come under the heading of descriptive statistics as they are the main tools used to collect data quantitatively and present in the more meaningful manner to draw some logical conclusions from the data collected. Once data is collected, it is nothing more than a raw set of data which may provide no clue about the potential information that they may provide. Thus one meaningful way of manipulating the data will calculate the mean or average of the data. It is also important to note that mean values may provide distorted information because of the outliers effect. One large observation value can distort the results and mean values may become more inflated due to the impact of outliers or larger values in the population.Mean value is considered as one of the most significant and important measures especially in finance. There are various uses of this measure in finance i.e. from measuring the average rate of return on an investment to calculating the weighted average rate of return of a portfolio.Similarly, average values are also calculated for studying the costs also as concepts such as average cost, average variable costs, average fixed costs are important concepts to understand in order to make important business decisions because controlling costs is one of the fundamental responsibilities of the managers.