Statistics for Business Analytics
2025-06-17
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. These lecture notes are 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 of statistics both for analysis and forecasting and would rely on modern statistical approaches.
These lecture notes relies heavily on the greybox package for R, which focuses on forecasting using regression models. In order to run examples from the lecture notes, you would need to install this package (Svetunkov, 2025):
A very important thing to note is that these lecture notes do 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 lecture notes that you can do all those nice tricks on your own if you want to.
Note that we use the following colour palette throughout the book:
ourPalette <- c("black",
# 2-Red, 3-green, 4-blue,
rgb(0.5,0.2,0.2,1), rgb(0.2,0.5,0.2,1), rgb(0.2,0.3,0.5,1),
# 5-yellow, 6-purple, 7-orange;
rgb(0.9,0.8,0.4,1), rgb(0.8,0.4,0.8,1), rgb(1,0.65,0.4,1),
# translucent 8-R, 9-G, 10-B
rgb(0.9,0.6,0.6,0.5), rgb(0.5,0.8,0.5,0.5), rgb(0.6,0.8,1,0.5),
# translucent 11-Y, 12-P, 13-O
rgb(0.9,0.8,0.4,0.5), rgb(0.7,0.55,0.7,0.5), rgb(1,0.65,0.4,0.5),
# 14-Grey, 15-Light grey, 16-dark grey, 17-very light grey
"grey", "lightgrey", "darkgrey", "grey95")
palette(ourPalette)This is why some images have colours that differ from the default ones.
If you want to get in touch with Ivan, there are lots of ways to do that: comments section on any page of my website, my other website, vk.com, Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter.
You can also find Ivan 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. (2022) 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 = {Lecture notes. OpenForecast},
note = {(version: [current date])},
url = {https://openforecast.org/sba/},
year = {2022}
}License
These lecture notes are licensed under Creative Common License by-nc-sa 4.0, which means that you can share, copy, redistribute and remix the content of the lecture notes for non-commercial purposes as long as you give appropriate credit to the author and provide the link to the original license. If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. See the explanation on the Creative Commons website.