statistical analysis

(noun)

The process of examining data to draw conclusions or insights, and determine cause-and-effect patterns between events; for example determining the safety and efficacy of new drugs by drawing out a probability as to whether the fact that a patient got better (or worse) was due to the drug or some other (perhaps random) factor.

Related Terms

Examples of statistical analysis in the following topics:

  • Data and Information

  • Combining internal and external equity

    • Alternatively, statistical techniques such as regression analysis are used to create a pay policy line.
    • In other words, the straight line generated by the regression analysis will be the line that best combines the internal value of a job (from job evaluation points) and the external value of a job (from the market survey).

  • Credit Ratings

    • A poor credit rating indicates a credit rating agency's opinion that the company or government has a high risk of defaulting, based on the agency's analysis of the entity's history and analysis of long term economic prospects.
    • In the United States, a credit score is a number based on a statistical analysis of a person's credit files, that in theory represents the creditworthiness of that person, which is the likelihood that people will pay their bills.

  • Economic Indicators

    • Economic indicators are key statistics about diverse sectors of the economy that are used to evaluate the health and future of the economy.
    • An economic indicator is a statistic that provides valuable information about the economy.
    • The Bureau of Labor Statistics is the principal fact-finding agency for the U.S. government in the field of labor economics and statistics.
    • Other producers of economic indicators includes the United States Census Bureau and United States Bureau of Economic Analysis.
    • Statistics that report the status of the economy a few months in the past are called lagging economic indicators.

  • Analyzing every stage of production

    • After every stage of production has been laid out, the next phase is to break the stages down into subtasks for further analysis.
    • Use this information to create baseline statistics against which future measurement can be judged.
    • Examples of waste measurement statistics include: utility and fuel bills, the number of trash bags the business fills daily (placing similar items of garbage into separate containers makes this process easier), water consumption figures, raw material invoices, and so on.
    • (ESSP CLP, ‘Product Stewardship through Life-cycle Analysis', Introduction to Sustainable Development for Engineering and Built Environment)

  • Analytical Mindset

    • Pushing gut feelings and intuition into the background in favor of framing issues through analysis is a constant struggle in nearly every organization.
    • Predictive analytics – Leveraging statistical models and machine learning, managers can predict future outcomes with varying degrees of statistical confidence.
    • Understand the value of analytical thinking as it pertains to management, and recall the various perspectives of analysis

  • Researching Consumer Markets

    • The field of consumer marketing research as a statistical science was pioneered by Arthur Nielsen with the founding of the ACNielsen Company in 1923.
    • Marketing research may also be described as the systematic and objective identification, collection, analysis, and dissemination of information for the purpose of assisting management in decision making related to the identification and solution of problems and opportunities in marketing.

  • Sampling

    • In marketing, samples are used to calculate statistics to determine how changing elements of the marketing mix impact customer behavior.
    • It is the systematic gathering, recording, and analysis of qualitative and quantitative data about issues relating to marketing products and services.
    • Its statistical significance and confidence is not calculated.
    • Techniques include choice modeling, maximum difference preference scaling, and covariance analysis.
    • Samples are collected and statistics are calculated from the samples so that one can make inferences or extrapolations from the sample to the population as a whole.

  • Free Enterprise

    • Economists, political economists, and historians have taken different perspectives on the analysis of capitalism.
    • Scatter graph of the People's Republic of China's GDP between years 1952 to 2005, based on publicly available nominal GDP data published by the People's Republic of China and compiled by Hitotsubashi University (Japan) and confirmed by economic indicator statistics from the World Bank.

  • Investment in Operations

    • Supply chains have become faster, cheaper, and more reliable through investment in information technology, cost-analysis, and process-analysis.
    • The classic supply chain approach has been to forecast future inventory demand using statistical trending and "best fit" techniques, which are based on historic demand and predicted future events.