Analytics for Managers

Catalog description

Business analytics refers to the skills, technologies, and practices for continuous iterative exploration and investigation of past business performance to gain insight and drive business planning. Business analytics focuses on developing new insights and understanding of business performance based on data and statistical methods. Business analytics has been widely adopted in different functional areas (i.e., accounting, finance, operations, marketing, and human resources) as well as a wide range of different industries (energy, healthcare, sports, government, etc.). For example, banks, such as Capital One, use analytics to segment customers based on credit risk, usage behavior and other characteristics and then to match customer characteristics with appropriate product offerings. Harrah’s, the gaming firm, uses analytics based on tracking consumer behavior to improve its customer loyalty programs. This course provides students with the fundamental concepts, techniques, and applications needed to understand the emerging role of business analytics in organizations, and the ability to communicate with analytics professionals to effectively use and interpret analytics models and results for making better business decisions. This course will also familiarize students with R (analyses software) and Tableau (visualization software) which are widely used in the industry.