IS 4487 - Introduction to Business Analytics

This course is an introduction to the practice of business analytics. Students will get an overview of the approaches, tools, and methods used by working data scientists and analysts to solve typical business problems. Rather than emphasizing analytic methods, however, this course uses detailed case studies to provide an overview of the process of solving business problems using data--what we'll call the analytics lifecycle--from understanding the business and framing the problem to modeling an outcome, deploying a solution and communicating insights. Students will also be introduced to the basics of Python, an open-source programming language, used for data analysis. The emphasis in this course will be on visualizing relationships in the data and communicating results in the context of the business problem. The course will also introduce ethical considerations in collecting and modeling data.