This is a great course for anyone who wants to gain foundational and critical analysis and statistics skills with no prior background. In this course, we explore the different ways of determining the probability of different events and outcomes. We want to be able to answer questions like: what is the probability that more than 90% of patients will show up for their appointments at a medical practice? what are the chances of a store having more than 20 customers in its first two hours of being open? how likely is it that a staff member will use 6 or fewer days of sick leave in a year?
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This course is divided into three topics:
- In Topic 1, we talk about the basics of probability – ideas like whether or not events can happen together, whether events can influence each other, and processes for calculating probabilities in simple situations.
- Topic 2 is about conditional probability ; that is, the idea that we can become more certain about particular outcomes when we know the circumstances under which they are occurring.
- In Topic 3, we discuss the "big 5" probability distributions ; powerful tools that can be used to calculate probabilities in a variety of complex situations. These distributions form the "heart" of the course and have practical applications in a wide range of real-life scenarios.
This course is part of the Statistics for Business Analytics Professional Certificate.
What you'll learn
Upon successful completion of this course, you will be able to:
- Describe the basic concepts of probability.
- Calculate basic probabilities for mutually exclusive, non-mutually exclusive and multiple independent events.
- Calculate conditional probabilities in simple and complex situations.
- Determine the probability of a given number of successes for discrete variables using binomial, Poisson and hypergeometric distributions.
- Determine the probability of outcomes above or below a threshold for continuous variables using normal and exponential distributions.
