Transition Week Workshop on MegaStat, R and R Commander for Master of Finance Students (MFin 604)

August 28 (T) and 29 (W), 2018

Both sessions will cover the same material

Time / Rooms

August 28 (Tuesday): 13:00-17:00 / Room DSB 505 – Groups 1A & 2A

August 29 (Wednesday): 13:00-17:00 / Room DSB 505 – Groups 1B & 2B

 

 

Mahmut Parlar [Home page]

 

(DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University, Canada)

 

Cellphone use policy

 

Our TA, Mehak Zaidi. Mehak is currently a summer intern (2018) at RBC.

 

Data collection: (1) Handspan and height, (2) Degrees and birthdays

 

 

We will start the workshop by first introducing MegaStat (an Excel add-in). We will then justify the use of R and Rcmdr in statistical analysis. These will be followed by covering a few examples of the most important topics. These introductory comments will be helpful when we start MFin 604.

(a) MegaStat (Installation and some examples)

 

In the first ten chapters of MFin 604 we will use the Excel add-in MegaStat 10.4 (available for Windows and Mac) that can be downloaded at the following link:

 

If you want to see and hear videos where I explain how to install MegaStat software, please visit the following link:

The Install Videos.

Publisher's web site. This site has links to download Windows and Mac versions of MegaStat.

Installation is quite easy and it involves two steps. Here is the documentation (MegaStatInstallationInstructionsWindows.pdf) which is also available at the publisher's web site link.

 

Note: To access MegaStat please type in the first word of Learning Objective 3 (LO3) in Chapter 3, in the LO summary at the beginning of the chapter, as the Username and Password.

 

(Don't forget to do Unblock and Extract all.)

 

Here are a few examples of using MegaStat: (We will look at these problems in more detail later in class.)

 

a.1 Graphics

 

Actual GMAT  scores of entering DeGroote MBA classes (2003 to 2005). Let's look at the 2003 scores.

IQ Scores  of 500 individuals.

a.2 Hypothesis testing and Confidence Intervals

DeGroote GMAT scores (2006 Samples) : In 2006, before the admissions are finalized, we have data for 45 newly admitted students with a sample average score of 631. Do we have a good reason to believe that the true mean (when admissions close) will be at least 640? Shall we reject the null hypothesis H0: μ ≥ 640? We can solve this problem with MegaStat's Hypothesis Testing option. Check MegaStat's Help file on Hypothesis Testing for further details.

With the same dataset, we can also do a confidence interval calculation.

 

(b) R, and R Commander (Installation and some examples)

 

Why R and R Commander?

 

Basics. Installation instructions, introduction to R and R Commander (Rcmdr) and R functions for basic statistical models

 

Regression. R functions for multiple regression and its ramifications

 

(c) A few words about the Avenue to Learn (A2L) system, and the course outline

 

I will show you how you can use A2L and we will also discuss the outline that's uploaded to A2L.