FIN60003: Business Modelling & Analysis- Business Report Writing Assignment

Internal Code: MAS1892

Business Report Writing Assignment:

Task: In this assignment you are expected to develop a business report that will be presented to a real estate company senior manager. The report should be informative but concise and follows a specific structure that allows the document to be easily read and understood. For this purpose please ensure that you have studied supplementary material about the academic report writing available on e-tivity 5.4 before you start your assignment. This assignment is worth 20% of your final mark. This assignment provides students with opportunity to: 1. combine statistical analysis and report writing skills to prepare a concise, non-technical business report, 2. draw a random sample to complete statistical analysis, 3. develop and enhance computing skills, specifically the use of the built-in functions in MS Excel and MS Word, 4. apply statistical techniques to a data set, and 5. reinforce taught concepts including descriptive statistics, sampling and estimation, hypothesis testing, correlation and regression. Most of your statistical calculations should be carried out using Excel only and you will use Microsoft Word and Excel to complete this assignment. 1. Select a Random Sample Select a random sample of size 100 from the given 1000 cases (assume this data set is the population of interest and you are not allowed to calculate any parameters such as mean and standard deviation). You will use this sample data to complete tasks 2 to 6. Since repeat cases may occur when you draw random numbers and each case can be included only once in your sample, some of you may end up with a sample size less than 100. In such a situation do not draw another sample to acquire 100 values. You will continue to work on your sample only, even though your sample is smaller than 100. 2. Descriptive Statistics Use appropriate data summary methods to describe the (data name) data in your sample using the (number of) variables. Use an appropriate graphical and/or summary statistical technique, chosen according to the type of variable. These techniques will be chosen from: Tabular Techniques:                                       Frequency tables and Grouped (joint) frequency tables. Graphical Techniques:                                   Pie chart, Bar graph, Histogram (avoid three dimensional graphs). Summary Statistics:                                       Mode, Median, Mean, Standard Deviation, Range, Coefficient of Variation and Interquartile Range. You will need to choose the most appropriate technique(s) for each variable being analysed. Less appropriate / inappropriate techniques will receive fewer/no marks. There are seven variables all together to be analysed. For a nominal or an ordinal variable draw a graph and present a frequency table in percentages. For a ratio or an interval variable draw a graph and a summary statistics table. Try to use variation in drawing graphs e.g. pie chart/ bar chart or histogram as much as possible. Do not draw two different graphs for the same variable. 3. Confidence intervals Estimate the following quantities, using 95% confidence intervals. Explain the meaning of your confidence intervals. i. The average age of property buyers for the AUCTION sales only. ii. The average total purchase price for all types of sales. Compare both intervals with their respective true means. 4. Hypothesis Testing Margaret has some assumptions about the property market and wants to check their validity in the new market conditions. Investigate these contentions by carrying out appropriate hypothesis tests. i. It is often felt that female property buyers spend less on average than male property buyers. For this hypothesis only consider AUCTION sales. ii. It is often felt that the average property prices differs for New South Wales and two other states (consider Vic and Qld as one sample). For this hypothesis use STATE. iii. It is often felt that the average number of rooms for properties in Victoria is more than properties in New South Wales. Only report a non-technical explanation of your methodology and your findings in the main section of the report. The computations and output should be placed in an appendix. 5. Correlation and Regression In this section, first, Jason intends to investigate the relationship between the property price and age of the property buyers for AUCTION sales only. As the second test, he investigates the relationship between the property price and land area. Use these variables to develop two regression models to predict average property price from age of buyers and also average property price from the land area. Make sure that you undertake full regression analyses, with appropriate discussions for each test and include: 1. a scattergram and a brief discussion 2. an estimate of the linear regression model 3. the coefficients of correlation and determination 4. a test of the hypothesis that there is no linear relationship between dependent and independent variables.