Analytics for Decision Making

Discover the foundational concepts that support modern data science and learn to analyze various data types and quality to make smart business decisions.

This statistics and data analysis course will help you understand the fundamental concepts of sound statistical thinking that can be applied in surprisingly wide contexts, sometimes even before there is any data! Key concepts like understanding variation, perceiving relative risk of alternative decisions, and pinpointing sources of variation will be highlighted.

These big picture ideas have motivated the development of quantitative models, but in most traditional statistics courses, these concepts get lost behind a wall of little techniques and computations. In this course we keep the focus on the ideas that really matter, and we illustrate them with lively, practical, accessible examples.

We will explore questions like: How are traditional statistical methods still relevant in modern analytics applications? How can we avoid common fallacies and misconceptions when approaching quantitative problems? How do we apply statistical methods in predictive applications? How do we gain a better understanding of customer engagement through analytics?

This course will be relevant for anyone eager to have a framework for good decision-making. It will be good preparation for students with a bachelor's degree contemplating graduate study in a business field.

What you'll learn:

• Variability in the real world and implications for decision making
• Data types and data quality with appropriate visualizations
• Apply data analysis to managerial decisions, especially in start-ups
• Making effective decisions from no data to big data (what should we collect and then what do we do with all this data?)