Robert Nau

Professor Emeritus

Fuqua School of Business

Duke University

Teaching and software:

• RegressIt Excel add-in web site
• Choice theory course web site
• Forecasting course web site

Throughout my career I taught a continuously-evolving elective course on statistical forecasting to MBA students and graduate students from other departments around the university. Some of my older, unplugged notes for it are posted on a public web site, statforecasting.com, which receives over 1 million daily visitors per year.

In connection with the course, I designed a free Excel add-in, RegressIt, which performs linear and logistic regression analysis. It offers high-quality, interactive table and chart output and includes a 2-way interface with the R programming language that allows Excel to be used as a front end and/or back end for linear and logistic regression analysis in R. RegressIt provides an array of novel tools for model space exploration and model comparison and testing, with many interactive features that are useful for classroom demonstrations and evaluation of student work as well as for supporting good analytical practices in general, and it includes extensive built-in teaching notes for regression.

I also regularly taught a Ph.D. course on rational choice theory (most recently in 2015) which was taken by students from a number of departments around the university. Some older notes for this course can be found here.