MTS 500 Business Analytics and Decision Making

Fall 2021

Instructor: Tulsi Das Lakhwani

Lecture: Friday 6:30 pm - 9:30 pm
Office Hours: Schedule by appointment
E-Mail: tlakhwani@iba.edu.pk Course Website: TBD

COURSE DESCRIPTION

The purpose of this course is to introduce you to data analytics, visualization, and decision
optimization. This course will expose you to the data analytics practices executed in the
business world. We will explore such key areas as the analytical process, how data is created,
stored, accessed, and how the organization works with data and creates the environment in
which analytics can flourish.
The ability to use data effectively to drive rapid, precise, and profitable decisions has been a
critical strategic advantage for companies as diverse as Walmart, Google, Capital One, and
Disney. For example, Capital One uses sophisticated analytic capabilities to match credit card
offerings to customers more accurately than their competition. Walmart uses analytics to
monitor and update its inventory in a way that allows it to serve its customers at an
exceptionally low cost. In addition, many current and recent startups such as Palantir and
Splunk are based on the application of analytics to large data bases.
A key element of decision making is to identify the best course of action. Since businesses
problems often have too many alternative solutions, you will learn how optimization can help
you identify the best option.
Data analytics is a broad category of technologies, applications, and processes for gathering,
storing, accessing, and analyzing data to help its users make better decisions. Although
business is a natural application for data analytics, it is not the only one. Data analytics are
used extensively in medicine, the life sciences, social sciences, as well as public policy.
Big Data analytics is one of the current “hot topics”. It is an area which is growing as
organizations realize that they must improve their understanding of their capabilities and
those of the competition if the quality of their decisions is to be competitive. The vast amount
of data now available to organizations adds to the complexity of analytics.

COURSE LEARNING OBJECTIVES

We have three goals in this course. The first is to help you think critically about data and the
analyses based on those data — whether conducted by you or someone else. The second is to
enable you to identify opportunities for creating value using business analytics. The third is to
help you estimate the value created using business analytics to address an opportunity.
Business analytics is an integral part of modern management — this course should provide
you with the foundation you need to understand and apply these methods to drive value.

COURSE MATERIAL

There will be cases, articles as well as slides that we will distribute. In addition, below are
some reference books

1. Business Analytics for Decision Making By Steven Orla Kimbrough, Hoong Chuin Lau
2. Business Analytics, 3rd edition by James R. Evans
3. Data Mining for Business Intelligence, Concepts, Techniques and Applications,
Shmueli, Patel, and Bruce: Wiley
4. Data Mining Techniques: For Marketing, Sales, and Customer Relationship
Management, 3rd Edition Gordon Linoff and Michael Berry, 2011: Wiley
5. Management Science: The Art of Modeling with Spreadsheets, Powell and Baker: Wiley

SOFTWARE

The purpose of the software project is to make you, your teammates, and the class familiar
with some types of software and apply it to analyzing data of some complexity. The project
should take the knowledge and background that you are learning this semester about data
analysis and visualization and put it to good use in a new, creative effort. A real key to the
project, however, is to select a data set that people will find interesting and intriguing. I will
provide you with some web sites where you can find data sets (or you can create or find your
own). We will work with all or some of these tools: SPSS Modeler, Excel Solver, WEKA,
Tableau, and Watson Studio.

REQUIREMENTS & GRADING

There will be periodic ‘concept checks’ to be done individually to check your understanding of
the material. This will either be an impromptu quiz or an assignment.

Your grade will be determined as follows:

• Participation - 10%
• Concept Checks - 30%
• Project – 40%
• Final - 20%

Participation will be based on your contribution to class discussion. We will keep it interactive
and share new ideas with the class.

Final would be a data-based case study or all MCQs.

Course grading will be relative with minimum grade B/B+ based on class size.

PROJECT

The project presentation should cover the motivation behind your project, a description of
your system, problems/things you learned. With the help of a dataset, you will work to solve a
problem and present to the class. The final design of the class presentation will be up to your
team, but it should include:

A description of the data set(s) you are using and the methods you used for attaining,
cleansing and/or formatting the data. What analysis of the data were you able to achieve?
What new information were you able to discover from your analysis of the data – trends etc.
Does the system work- does it read in the data and present a visualization/analysis of the
data? Does your project support different analytical questions about the data? Was your
presentation an effective discussion and portrayal of the project? Does your report help
someone understand the problem and how your system addresses that problem?

TENTATIVE COURSE OUTLINE

I. Overview of Business Analytics

a. Translating business problems into data driven problems
II. Data Sources
a. Data Warehouse
b. Cloud
III. Importance of Data Quality
a. Data Cleaning
b. Data Preparation
IV. Data Exploration and Pattern Discovery
a. Market Basket Analysis
b. Association Rules
c. Clustering & Segmentation
V. BI & Data Mining
a. Theory & Methodology
b. CRISP-DM
VI. Predictive Modeling
a. Classification
b. Decision Trees
c. Regression Models
VII. Decision Modeling
a. Optimization Problems
VIII. Data Visualization
a. Tools & Techniques
 Introduction to Analytics
Session 1 Thinking About Analytical Problems
Readings and Discussion
Analytical Technologies
Session 2 Data Storage & Cloud
Readings and Discussion
Real Word Organizations, Roles & Structures
Session 3 Data Governance, Data Privacy & Data Quality
Issues & Discussion
Exploratory Data Analysis
Session 4 Data Extraction with SQL
Discussion and Assignment
Data Visualizations
Value of Data Visualization
Session 5
Case Studies
Using Tableau Software
Session 6 Large Scale Data Analysis
Classification & Regression
Session 7 Real World Problems and Application

Unstructured Data Analysis

Session 8 Clustering Techniques & Anomaly Detection
Customer Segmentation in the Industry
Introduction to SPSS Modeler
Implementing analytics in SPSS
Session 9
Real Use Cases
Assignment

Session 10 Dealing with Uncertainty & Risk

Decision Optimization Problems
Application
Session 11 Using Solver in Excel
Introduction to Social Network Analysis
Session 12 Application in Real World
Assignment

Working with Watson Studio for Data Analysis

Session 13
Getting Certification

Introduction to Text Analytics

Session 14 Use Cases
Challenges

Session 15 Final Project Work

Session 16 Review & Discussion