This course will provide you with hands-on experience to promote the use of statistical thinking and techniques to apply them to make educated decisions whenever there is variation in business data. Therefore, it is a course in statistical thinking via a data-oriented approach. Know that data are only crude information and not knowledge by themselves. Data becomes information when it becomes relevant to your decision problem. Information becomes fact when the data can support it.
Fact becomes knowledge when it is used in the successful completion of decision process.
The following figure illustrates the statistical thinking process based on data in constructing statistical models for decision making under uncertainties. That's why we need statistical data analysis. Statistics arose from the need to place knowledge on a systematic evidence base. This required a study of the laws of probability, the development of measures of data properties and relationships, and so on. Knowledge is more than knowing something technical.