by John C Lee (The Chase Manhattan Bank, New York)

The personal computer has made statistical analysis easier and cheaper. Previously, statistical analysis was difficult for many reasons. Two of the reasons were: (1) statistical analysis was slow and tedious because calculations were done by hand; (2) it was costly because it was done on mainframes and mainframe time was expensive.

This book discusses statistical analysis using two personal computer software packages, Minitab 12 and Microsoft Excel 97. Minitab was chosen because it is powerful and is one of the more user-friendly statistical software packages. Microsoft Excel 97 was selected because it is one of the most important software packages to learn and most companies use Microsoft Excel. Excel is a software package that is not dedicated to statistical analysis like Minitab, but it has many statistical features and a very powerful development environment for writing customized statistical analysis.

The book is organized in a textbook format. Each chapter discusses statistical concepts and illustrates the use of Minitab and/or Excel. Often it becomes necessary to write macros (programs) in order to do specific statistical analysis. This books prints the codes of the macros for the reader to use and study. This is valuable because usually the difficult part is how to write the code.

What the reader will find after studying this book is that statistical analysis will become more fun because he will have more time doing statistical analysis and make less statistical calculations.

• Introduction and Descriptive Statistics:
  • Introduction
  • Data Collection and Presentation
  • Frequency Distributions and Data Analyses
  • Numerical Summary Measures
• Probability and Important Distributions:
  • Probability Concepts and Their Analysis
  • Discrete Random Variables and Probability Distributions
  • The Normal and Lognormal Distributions
  • Sampling and Sampling Distributions
  • Other Continuous Distributions and Moments for Distributions
• Statistical Inferences Based on Samples:
  • Estimation and Statistical Quality Control
  • Hypothesis Testing
  • Analysis of Variance and Chi-Square Tests
• Regression and Correlation: Relating Two or More Variables:
  • Simple Linear Regression and the Correlation Coefficient
  • Simple Linear Regression and Correlation: Analyses and Applications
  • Multiple Linear Regression
  • Other Topics in Applied Regression Analysis
• Selected Topics in Statistical Analysis for Business and Economics:
  • Nonparametric Statistics
  • Time-Series: Analysis, Model, and Forecasting
  • Index Numbers and Stock Market Indexes
  • Sampling Surveys: Methods and Applications
  • Statistical Decision Theory: Methods and Applications
  • Using Microsoft Excel to Estimate Alternative Option Pricing Models