MSBA 6410: Exploratory Data Analytics and Visualization (Fall 2019)

MSBA 6410 is a required course for the M.S. in Business Analytics program. This course is designed to prepare aspiring data scientists for the rapidly changing digital environment faced by companies and their need to discover novel and actionable patterns, enabling data-driven decision making. Data Science is a growing interdisciplinary field centered on the use of systems, processes, and analytical methods to extract knowledge or insights from data in various forms. The disciplines of Data Mining, Machine Learning, Statistics, and Visualization play a central role in the analysis of data across the business landscape, and therefore are integral components of this course. Students will learn a sampling of fundamental and widely used exploratory data analytics techniques and methodologies. Additionally, students will also have hands-on experience with these analytics techniques in a variety of business applications—using modern, state-of-the-art tools—supported by real-world datasets. At the end of this course, students will be empowered to use exploratory data analytics to discover, visualize, and disseminate nonobvious patterns about real-world problems. Therefore, we have partnered with Mille Lacs Corporate Ventures (MLCV), to execute a live case competition during the last 4 weeks of this course.