We are finding that we have too many products on our shelves and some of the products aren’t selling at all. We need to better manage our inventory. We have historical data for our products. Based on our historical sales, what is the unit sales number of each product type that we should expect in the future?

We are a fairly large company and we, therefore, have several retail outlets where our shoes are sold. Suppose we want to compare our east and west locations. Does one location outperform the other? We will make the assumption that the same people don’t go around and shop at both shops. The shops are geographically far apart in this case. We can then say that the two samples are independent. Once again, we don’t know the population variance, but given that this is the same market, in the same country, we can assume it is equal. We are in the case of independent samples with population variance unknown but assumed to be equal.

The next series is called hypothesis testing. The previous series of posts was inferential statistics.