Business Analytics

This course is about creating business insights from big data. The learning objective is to develop three abilities. The first is the ability to manipulate big data. This includes downloading, merging, appending and reshaping data, and creating new variables. Second is the ability to analyze data. This includes exploratory data analysis, visualization, and sophisticated predictive algorithms including nearest neighbor, naive Bayes, decision trees, regression and others. We will pay special attention to validating our predictions using the train and test regimen. Finally, students will develop an ability to formulate questions that can be answered using big data, and lead to better business performance. This includes using data to improve marketing, pricing, investing capital, customer satisfaction, costs, etc. The data manipulation and analysis will be implemented by writing programs in statistical software.