Information Technology & Quantitative Methods

Catalog description

Data preparation and cleaning, data analysis, and data visualization are now at the heart of managerial decision making. This course will illustrate both IT and Quantitative Methods through three fairly involved examples and extensive hands-on experience. Cleaning data will lead us to database principles that underlie data independence and referential integrity. Summarizing a modest-sized dataset (about 8,000 rows) will introduce statistical summaries, some basic visualization tools, and the statistics behind correlation coefficients and matrices. Pivot Tables and various visualization techniques will allow us to answer the question, “What is the data telling us?” The final project allow us to apply results from calculus to generate forecasts which we will then visually and statistically compare by using 3-D graphics and hypothesis testing. We will use the computer for the entire course; nothing is done by hand.