PDT-BusAN-03 - Business Analytics Boot Camp

Course Description

New Workshop!

Organizations are frequently overwhelmed with the volume of information they have, yet most struggle to make sense out of this data. Business Analytics is a discipline that uses statistical techniques, machine learning, and data science to uncover knowledge and meaning embedded within the data to enhance decision-making and capitalize on the wealth of information assets within an organization.

The Business Analytics Boot Camp will introduce participants to the theoretical and practical concepts and techniques involved in analytics, as well as offer hands-on experience with industry tools and techniques.

Boot Camp topics will include terminology and concepts used in analytics; background on descriptive, prescriptive, and predictive analytics techniques; the use of Microsoft Excel for analytics techniques; SQL querying; using Tableau Desktop data visualization software; and the R language (R and RStudio).

Course Outline

Tentative Boot Camp Schedule:

Day 1 – Introduction and Excel

• Introduction and Welcome
• Introduction to Business Analytics – Untangling the mess of terms
• Basic approach and life cycle for engaging in analytics projects
• The skill set of a business analytics professional
• Structured vs. Unstructured data
• Where to find your data
• Brief review of Excel and static/dynamic references
• Walk through downloading the Data Analysis Excel add-in for ANOVA and Regression

Day 2 – Analytics and Examples using Excel, and SQL Querying

• General rules for structured data and structuring data in Excel to “ease” your analysis
• Getting your data into Excel and structured “right”
• Addressing noisy data and imputation methods
• Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts – a step in the right direction
• Summarizing data and calculating measures of central tendency
• Use Excel to create some basic graphs and visualizations
• Using Data Analysis Toolpak
• SQL Bootcamp all afternoon
• Introduction to the Assignment to do between now and the next session

Day 3 – Introduction to Tableau

• Review of Assignment
• Differences between Business Intelligence and Business Analytics
• Exploratory data analysis using descriptive statistics and basic visualizations
• Coming up with questions and goals for your analyses
• Loading data into tableau
• The Tableau Interface
• Creating a basic map
• Filtering data
• Creating calculated fields

Day 4 – Introduction to R

• Loading data into R
• Basic R commands
• Finding missing data in R
• Use an example data set in R
• Create plots in R and a histogram in R
• Get basic descriptive statistics in R
• Create a basic linear regression model in R