Business Analytics Specialization

Nearly every aspect of business is affected by data analytics. For businesses to capitalize on data analytics, they need leaders who understand the business analytic workflow. This course addresses the human skills gap by providing a foundational set of data processing skills that can be applied to many business settings.

In this course you will use a data analytic language, R, to efficiently prepare business data for analytic tools such as algorithms and visualizations. Cleaning, transforming, aggregating, and reshaping data is a critical, but inconspicuous step in the business analytic workflow. As you learn how to use R to prepare data for analysis you will gain experience using RStudio, a powerful integrated development environment (IDE), that has many built-in features that simplify coding with R. As you learn about the business analytic workflow you will also consider the interplay between business principles and data analytics. Specifically, you will explore how delegation, control, and feasibility influence the way in which data is processed. You will also be introduced to examples of business problems that can be solved with data automation and analytics, and methods for communicating data analytic results that do not require copying and pasting from one platform to another.

This course introduces students to the science of business analytics while casting a keen eye toward the artful use of numbers found in the digital space. The goal is to provide businesses and managers with the foundation needed to apply data analytics to real-world challenges they confront daily in their professional lives. Students will learn to identify the ideal analytic tool for their specific needs; understand valid and reliable ways to collect, analyze, and visualize data; and utilize data in decision making for their agencies, organizations or clients.

This course introduces several tools for processing business data to obtain actionable insight. The most important tool is the mind of the data analyst. Accordingly, in this course, you will explore what it means to have an analytic mindset. You will also practice identifying business problems that can be answered using data analytics. You will then be introduced to various software platforms to extract, transform, and load (ETL) data into tools for conducting exploratory data analytics (EDA). Specifically, you will practice using PowerBI, Alteryx, and RStudio to conduct the ETL and EDA processes.

The learning outcomes for this course include: 1. Development of an analytic mindset for approaching business problems. 2. The ability to appraise the value of datasets for addressing business problems using summary statistics and data visualizations. 3. The ability to competently operate business analytic software applications for exploratory data analysis.

One of the most exciting aspects of business analytics is finding patterns in the data using machine learning algorithms. In this course you will gain a conceptual foundation for why machine learning algorithms are so important and how the resulting models from those algorithms are used to find actionable insight related to business problems. Some algorithms are used for predicting numeric outcomes, while others are used for predicting the classification of an outcome. Other algorithms are used for creating meaningful groups from a rich set of data. Upon completion of this course, you will be able to describe when each algorithm should be used. You will also be given the opportunity to use R and RStudio to run these algorithms and communicate the results using R notebooks.