Programming for Analytics

2.5 credits

This course provides a foundation in programming within the R environment. Traditional programming concepts--operators, data structures, control structures, repetition, user-defined functions, and scoping--will be central to the learning objectives, but the concepts will be taught in context of marketing and business analytics problems related to data management and visualization. In addition to high-level programming, the students will gain a foundational understanding of how data is organized and pulled from databases, including the querying process that turns raw data into the kinds of datasets that more advanced analytics tools leverage. In the process, students will learn rudimentary SQL and the related core concepts (e.g., aggregation and joins). The course involves hands-on tutorial assignments involving practical pattern matching as well as less structured programming assignments, where the students are expected to write their own programs.