Data Analysis & Decision
Making
Albright, Winston
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The 8th edition, which is scheduled to be
released some time in 2024 will have the following changes:
·
Chapter 4 on Excel’s “power” tools is being
expanded to two chapters: the first on importing and transforming data with
Power Query; the second on using Power Pivot, along with the DAX language, to
create pivot table reports. Both chapters will also have some coverage of these
same tools in the free Power BI Desktop software.
·
Chapter 17 on data mining is being expanded to
two chapters: the first on classification and the second on clustering and
market basket analysis.
·
Chapters 7, 8, and 9 are being condensed into
a single Statistical Inference chapter. It will include all the main concepts
and many of the same examples, but in a more compact version.
·
There will be many appendices on the R
programming language for those instructors who want to incorporate this popular
language into their courses.
Note for StatTools users: One user recently
complained that several example and solution files in Chapter 3 (and maybe
Chapter 2?) of the 7th edition provide different values for medians
and other percentiles than they obtain with StatTools. (Note that my solutions
in the 7th edition don’t use StatTools. They use built-in Excel
functions: MEDIAN, QUARTILE, and PERCENTILE.) The statistics literature
provides several slightly different methods for calculating percentiles,
including the median, and StatTools lets you choose which of these you prefer.
You can make this choice from Application Settings under the Utilities
dropdown. I doubt that many users will purposely choose a method other than the
StatTools default, but such a choice could lead to slightly different answers.
In any case, the differences should be negligible for all practical purposes.
By the way, the reason for slightly different methods is due to small data
sets. For example, the 10th percentile is not clearly defined (and
probably not even relevant) in a data set with only 7 observations!
Tables of contents:
Errata:
Visit the Cengage site for our books.
Send e-mail to albright@indiana.edu
Albright and Winston are both
retired from the Kelley
School of Business, Indiana University, Bloomington.
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Updated: 2/10/2023