The specialization in Business Analytics teaches the use of data and models to support decision making in business. Students learn how to model such relationships as the impact of advertising on sales, how historical data predict stock returns and how changes in task characteristics can influence time to completion. Broad understanding and knowledge of important business analytic topics and how they can be used to support decision making in all business areas, government, education, and agriculture. Technical procedures used to describe, predict and prescribe data into information for decision making. Data exploration and how it results in a sequence of descriptive, predictive and prescriptive processes to result in unique and new information on which decisions can be made.
In this specialization, the focus is in learning skills like Data Mining for Business Intelligence, Decision Models, Econometrics, Forecasting Time Series Data, Introduction to Stochastic Processes Managing for Quality, Risk Management Systems, Trading Strategies and Systems, Regression and Multivariate Data Analysis.
By building stronger analytical skills, management students will be able to tackle complex business and societal problems such as predicting and better understanding customer buying trends, optimizing organizational design, collecting and processing competitive intelligence, building an efficient healthcare system, improving retail sales, or helping brand managers gather critical feedback on the success of a marketing campaign. Some of the topics that will be discussed in this course include Big Data, Strategy Simulation Modeling and Decision Models, Data Mining, Strategy Analytics, Prediction, Social Media Analytical Tools, and Data Visualization