Foundations of Analytics

3 units

The steeply decreasing costs of gathering, storing, and processing data have created a strong motivation for organizations to move toward data-driven approaches to problem solving. As such, data analytics continues to grow rapidly in importance across industry, government, and nonprofit organizations. This course seeks to equip students with a wide range of data analytics techniques that serve as the foundation for a broad range of applications, including descriptive, inferential, predictive, and prescriptive analytics. Students will learn the process of building a data model as well as a variety of analytics techniques and under what situations they are best employed. Through lectures and practical exercises, students will become familiar with the computational mathematics that underpin analytics; the elements of statistical modeling and machine learning; model interpretation and assessment; and structured and unstructured data analysis. Students will also undertake a project to build an analytical model using a real-world dataset.