STATISTICS FOR BUSINESS DYNAMICS

The course aims at equipping the students with the statistical tools most suitable for the evaluation of international markets, starting from economic, financial, socio-economic and institutional data which are relevant for firms decisions.

The students, at the end of the course should learn:
- which are the data sources relevant for the international market analysis
- select the relevant variables to support firm internazionalization
- analyse macroeconomic variables to profile foreign regions and Countries in terms of risks/opportunities for firms

- Basic knowledge of statistics and probability (with particular reference to simple regression)
- basic knowledge of R

- Relevant data sources for international market analysis
- data cleaning: statistical tools for missing data imputation
- selection of the relevant variables: stepwise methods, shrinkage methods
- reduction to essential dimensions: principal components and principal component regression, pls
- validation and cross-validation

The main referral text for statistical methods is:
Gareth, James, et al. An introduction to statistical learning: with applications in R. Spinger, 2013.

Class notes, commented R scripts and other materials will be uploaded in the moodle page of the course

The exam will consist in the writing of a report in which the students will analyze, through R, the international markets offering the best opportunities for a specific region or country. Students will be evaluated both on the way they apply the R code to the new data and on the comments provided to highlight the results.

To pass, students must demonstrate their ability to apply the R code seen in class to new data, providing a ranking of nations based on their best model. Students who also manage to provide a ranking by region and the importance of different variables for the ranking, and who comment on the code from the problem description and data to the comparison of the different solutions obtained, will achieve the highest grades.

Interactive, hands-on approach: lectures and R lab sessions will follow a leading case study

English

written