Preface to the Second Edition

At the outset, I would like to say that the basic objective of the second edition of this text is to present a modern introduction to statistical methods and data analysis for students pursuing courses in business administration, commerce and economics both at the under-graduate and post-graduate levels.

While retaining many pedagogical aids of the earlier edition, care has been taken to improve the text both in its contents and their presentation. In particular, I would like to mention the following additional features in this edition:

1. The chapter on Time Series Analysis has been extended to cover forecasting. This section deals with different methods of forecasting, measurement of forecast error and criteria for choosing a suitable forecasting model.

2. A large number of different types of examples under the caption “additional examples” are included in each chapter i.e. from Chapters 5 to 22.

3. In addition to ‘true or false’ types of questions which were given in the earlier edition, the multiple-choice questions are given at the end of each chapter except Chapters 3 and 4 on graphs and diagrams.

4. A write-up on Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) is given at the end of the book (after Chapter 22). This note gives briefly a few examples pertaining to different topics to illustrate how statistical analysis can be carried out by using the software package of the SPSS.

Apart from these major features, certain sub-topics have been included as well as some reorganisation of chapters has been attempted. With the inclusion of these additional features, it is hoped that the second edition will be more useful to the students than the earlier one.

G C BERI