ABSTRACT
To think statistically requires an understanding of variation. As we saw in the first chapter, managers have to draw conclusions and make decisions in a variable and unpredictable world. We saw also, in Chapters 2 and 3, how data are important for effective decision making and that it is important for data to be appropriately tabulated and displayed in order to give meaningful insights into a problem. In this chapter we begin to look beyond the data to try and understand more about the situation that gave rise to the data. In particular, we will look at how data can be represented by simple statistical models.
