The primary purpose of this course is to deliver an experiential learning opportunity in business analytics to students at Paul College, building skills required of analytics professionals. The course delivery is a mix of lectures and project-based learning. In one course period per week, lectures on modern statistical tools and practice are given. In the second course period per week, students apply those tools to address challenges in real data provided by industrial partners. In addition, industrial partners deliver guest lectures both in-person and remotely. In Fall 2019, students are working to automate the forecasting systems of Peak Organic Brewing, a major New England brewery.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this course students will be able to:

1. Design and build analytics products, dashboards, decision support tools, and interactive data visualizations using statistical software packages;
2. Utilize modern and computational statistical methods to learn from complex and noisy data sets;
3. Integrate statistical software with information systems and SQL databases;
4. Utilize modern analytics tools such as GitHub, R, TidyVerse, …
5. Understand the practical functions and challenges of analytics organizations by interacting with industry partners.

Taught in Fall 2019

Course Syllabus