1. Asian School of Business PG Programme in Management (2005-06) Course: Quantitative Methods in Management I Instructor: Chandan Mukherjee Session 1: Variability and Distribution

2. Some women are taller than some men. Therefore, it is wrong to say that men are taller than women Point: Variability comes in the way of unambiguous comparison

3. Don’t know what to make of it!! Except that asset varies ….. that is all.

4. Now it is beginning to make sense – it varies over a wide range of Rs. 0.07 Crores to Rs.445.63 Crores. Many of them are small in terms of fixed capital, only a handful are really large.

5. ONEWAY SCATTER PLOT ScaleMinimumMaximum Shows visually the fact of preponderence of small sized producers units of Yarn.

6. FRREQUENCY DISTRIBUTION: Concretising the pattern numerically

7. HISTOGRAM: Depicting the pattern visually

8. FRREQUENCY POLYGON: Towards abstraction

9. HISTOGRAM to DENSITY CURVE: Abstraction into a mathematical model

10. Exam Score: Density Curve Example Area under the curve gives the relative frequency of values within the interval

11. Distinguishing Features of a Distribution Cluster Scatter Shape (Symmetric / Asymmetric) Tails (Thin / Thick)

12. Summary Of The Points Made So Far The essential activity in studying relationships between different entities/factors is that of comparison; Variability comes in the way of comparison. Therefore, to compare, we need to characterise the variability; Variability leads to the concept of distribution – the key concept in statistics and data analysis. It is the manner in which the observations (data values: quantitative or qualitative) spread out across the range of observation; There are four distinguishing features viz. cluster, scatter, shape and the tails.