Introduction to Data Analytics

Prerequisites: MSBA students only. Data analytics involves exploring, discovering, interpreting, and communicating meaningful patterns in data. Business analytics applies these principles to organizational data, driving data-driven decision-making and creating competitive advantages. This course emphasizes data munging and techniques for handling structured datasets. Students will learn to work with common data types and import them into Python. The core focus will be on data manipulation, including data cleaning, handling missing values, and performing transformations to prepare datasets for analysis. Students will also develop exploratory data analysis, visualization, and summarization skills. These foundational steps are crucial for formulating business problems and developing complex statistical models. The course will conclude with creating data reports and interactive dashboards, essential tools for effective data communication in any data science project.