Couse Instructor & Senior Co-teacher

Prof. Richard R. Batsell

Jesse H. Jones Distinguished Associate Professor of Management

Rice University, Jones Graduate School of Business

Ph.D. (1976) The University of Texas at Austin

Areas of Expertise: Marketing Research and Statistics, Decision Analysis, Industrial Marketing, Buyer Behavior

Prof. ZHENG Ming

Professor/Department Chair, Dept. of Statistics

Fudan University, School of Management

Ph.D., Mathematical Statistics, Fudan University

Areas of Expertise: Survival Analysis, Semi-parametric Analysis

Couse Description

Modern management systems are increasingly dependent on data-based decision making tools. Thus to be an effective executive, you need to have a basic grounding in statistics to understand these systems and to make the most of information in your organization; to be a leader in your industry, you need to be able to apply data analysis in creative ways to innovate in your markets, discovering useful patterns and spotting important trends ahead of your competitors.

This course is designed with two major objectives: first, to help you thoroughly understand and be able to competently apply those statistical methods typically used in the analysis of business data; second, to affect how you think about problems.  If data can help resolve a business problem, this course should enable you to structure the problem in a way that facilitates its analysis, specify the data that needs to be analyzed, decide on the statistical technique(s) most appropriate for analyzing the data, apply the technique(s) correctly and insightfully interpret the results in terms of their implications for the original problem.