This book is in Open Review. I want your feedback to make the book better for you and other readers. To add your annotation, select some text and then click the on the pop-up menu. To see the annotations of others, click the button in the upper right hand corner of the page

# Preface

Have you encountered the term “Business Analytics” in your life? If not, then you are probably wondering what it means. If yes, then again, you are probably wondering what it means. It is a term that is used nowadays instead of such terms as “Operations Research” and “Management Science.” It is a discipline that covers a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods that can be used in practice for real life decisions. It uses methods and approaches from different scientific areas, including statistics, forecasting, optimisation, operations management etc. This textbook is focused on the core of quantitative side of the discipline - statistics. While there are many books on statistics, the author failed to find one that would be focused on the application side, discuss the application of statistics both for analysis and forecasting and would rely on modern statistical approaches.

This textbook relies heavily on the greybox package for R, which focuses on forecasting using regression models. In order to run examples from the textbook, you would need to install this package :

install.packages("greybox")

A very important thing to note is that this textbook does not use tidyverse packages. I like base R, and, to be honest, I am sure that tidyverse packages are great, but I have never needed them in my research. So, I will not use pipeline operators, tibble or tsibble objects and ggplot2. It is assumed throughout the textbook that you can do all those nice tricks on your own if you want to.

If you want to get in touch with me, there are lots of ways to do that: comments section on any page of my website, my Russian website, vk.com, Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter.

You can also find me on ResearchGate, StackExchange and StackOverflow, although I’m not really active there. Finally, I also have GitHub account.

You can use the following to cite the online version of this book:

• Svetunkov, I. (2021) Statistics for Business Analytics: Lancaster, UK. openforecast.org/sba. Accessed on [current date].

If you use LaTeX, the following can be used instead:

@MISC{SvetunkovSBA,
title = {Statistics for Business Analytics},
author = {Ivan Svetunkov},
howpublished = {OpenForecast},
note = {(version: [current date])},
url = {https://openforecast.org/sba/},
year = {2021}
}