EMC Proven Professional – Data Science and Big Data Analytics — Question 4

Your company has 3 different sales teams. Each team's sales manager has developed incentive offers to increase the size of each sales transaction. Any sales manager whose incentive program can be shown to increase the size of the average sales transaction will receive a bonus.
Data are available for the number and average sale amount for transactions offering one of the incentives as well as transactions offering no incentive.
The VP of Sales has asked you to determine analytically if any of the incentive programs has resulted in a demonstrable increase in the average sale amount.
Which analytical technique would be appropriate in this situation?

Answer options

Correct answer: A

Explanation

One-way ANOVA is appropriate here because it allows for the comparison of the means of multiple groups (the different incentive programs) to see if at least one has a significantly higher average sales amount compared to the others. Multi-way ANOVA is not necessary since we are only comparing one factor (the incentive program). The Student's t-test is only suitable for comparing two groups, and the Wilcoxson Rank Sum Test is a non-parametric alternative that is not needed when we have normally distributed data suitable for ANOVA.