Analytics: Essential Tools and Methods

Analytical models are key to understanding data, generating predictions, and making business decisions. Without models it’s nearly impossible to gain insights from data. In modeling, it’s essential to understand how to choose the right data sets, algorithms, techniques and formats to solve a particular business problem.

In this course, part of the Analytics: Essential Tools and Methods MicroMasters program, you’ll gain an intuitive understanding of fundamental models and methods of analytics and practice how to implement them using common industry tools like R.

You’ll learn about analytics modeling and how to choose the right approach from among the wide range of options in your toolbox.

You will learn how to use statistical models and machine learning as well as models for:

• classification;
• clustering;
• change detection;
• data smoothing;
• validation;
• prediction;
• optimization;
• experimentation;
• decision making.

Today, businesses, consumers, and societies leave behind massive amounts of data as a by-product of their activities. Leading-edge companies in every industry are using analytics to replace intuition and guesswork in their decision-making. As a result, managers are collecting and analyzing enormous data sets to discover new patterns and insights and running controlled experiments to test hypotheses.

This course prepares students to understand business analytics and become leaders in these areas in business organizations. This course teaches the scientific process of transforming data into insights for making better business decisions. It covers the methodologies, issues, and challenges related to analyzing business data. It will illustrate the processes of analytics by allowing students to apply business analytics algorithms and methodologies to business problems. The use of examples places business analytics techniques in context and teaches students how to avoid the common pitfalls, emphasizing the importance of applying proper business analytics techniques.