Data Driven Decision Making

Catalog description

In every aspect of our daily lives, from the way we work, shop, communicate, or socialize; we are both consuming and creating vast amounts of information. More often than not, these daily activities create a trail of digitized data that is being stored, mined, and analyzed by entities in the private (e.g. Google, Wal-Mart) as well as the public and non-profit sectors (e.g academia, government). The general goals of these data driven initiatives is the hope of generating valuable intelligence that is pertinent to business decisions or public policies. For example, customer transaction databases provide vast amounts of high-quality data that can allow firms to understand customer behavior, and customize business tactics to increasingly fine segments or even segments of one. However, much of the promise of such data-driven policies has largely failed to materialize; primarily due to the difficulty of translating data into actionable strategies. The objectives of this course are to fill this gap by training you with the tools and techniques needed to analyze large databases, expose you to a wide variety of issues in an empirical context, and instilling an intuition for D3M, i.e. how to generate insights from the volumes