Write your thoughts on this discussion. Does this explain why business research, statistics, data, and decision models are important to business?

Business research, statistics, data and decision models help businesses decide how to act. (If they are smart.) Much of what my company is doing now is centered around this topic.

Businesses generate raw data. That is, every activity they do can put out a single "point". Maybe that point is totally standalone, maybe it falls on the spectrum somewhere. (Cross sectional or time series) Each one of these points can be collected and turned into a report of some sort. Usually these reports give a long list of information. It is up to the managers to interpret this information and decide how to act on this "information". (This can happen on any type of scale. Maybe you are collecting data on a small scale for your own use, or, maybe you are a company that collects larges swaths of information and turns this into business research for profit.)

True to life example: Today, I received an email from the regional manager. The manager says, please look at these aging reports and decide what Work Orders we can close out or partially invoice for this month. This reported was created by our finance department. By way of sampling the information in the report, we all realize very quickly that the report is full of full of poor information. (Unfortunately, in this case, garbage in, garbage out.) By response to this, our manger can determine that our finance department needs to refine their report before passing senior management further information on projected revenue, or work in progress.)

Sampling is the process of choosing data points to confirm trends,or, create data from a large pool of data. In the input stage, maybe you have 1000 data points. Sometimes, it is not possible to enter all data points, so, "samples" can be chosen over the larger body. In the interpolation stage, sometimes it is not practical to read or assess all of the information, so, sampling the output can give you a general idea of the trends. (Business & IP Centre, 2020)

Another true story: Another e-mail comes through regarding a specific fee we have been charging. They had more than 300 data points to work with, and collated them down to 167 based upon filters. The samples they took from this filtered information yielded an average amount. We were really looking for a "single figure amount" and by sampling, we were able to come up with this amount.