Principles of Managerial Statistics and Data Science

Preface

There is a wide array of resources these days that introduce Statistics and data science. Textbooks, videos, online courses, web‐based interactive platform, and even mobile apps are available. This leads to the question of whether a new textbook is necessary. Yet, it is not difficult to argue that the answer is yes. Three main reasons should be emphasized. In order of importance, the recommendations on how to teach Statistics have not been adopted fully; the new fields of big data, data analytics and data science, have come into play; and the field of Statistics has changed.

The 2016 Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education (GAISE) College Report emphasizes six recommendations to teach introductory courses in statistics. Among them, teach statistical thinking, focus on conceptual understanding, and use of real data with context and purpose. Multiple textbooks have succeeded in teaching statistical thinking. There has also been some progress on addressing conceptual understanding, although there is still some vagueness in the explanations of concepts. Furthermore, although some interesting examples and exercises have been made available to students, the “context and purpose” component of the data remains elusive. Most of the time, data sets (two words) are partially generic or heavily filtered and subsetted. One avenue that shows promise is the launching of open data portals by many cities around the world. By using local data, students become ...