BC3407

R and Python for Business Analytics

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Course Description and Scope

This is an introductory course designed for a business analytics student who has no programming
background and is interested to learn how to conduct business analytics programmatically. It is oriented
to enhance your technical skillset. The aim of this course is to provide a broad understanding on how to
manage data, the process of preparing data for analysis, basics of analytics, and the means to
communicate analytics outcome. This course will equip you with the ability to write customized solutions
to inform business decision, integrate statistical libraries for data analysis, and construct visuals or reports
for business understanding. This module will provide you with individual hands-on practices to hone your
coding skillset and opportunity to develop coding solution in a team. We utilize Python and R languages
as the medium of learning because they are the most in-demand coding language and its user-friendly
syntaxes are well suited for beginner level. You will utilize modern development tools to turn information
into insights. In essence, this course exposes students to computational thinking so that they understand
the possibilities of automation.

Course Objectives

1. Interpret and use elements of a programming language

2. Write code that allows you to solve simple business problem programmatically.
3. Manage data to sufficiently derive and communicate analytics outcome.
4. Apply techniques to conduct data analysis and visualization
5. Apply appropriate statistical and graphing modules or use visualization software to present data
graphically.

Course Assessment

Component Marks Individual/Group

Class Participation 10 Individual

Practical Assessment 30 Individual

Group Project 40 Team

Group Presentation 20 Team

Total 100

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Distributed by Nanyang Business School, Nanyang Technological University. All Rights Reserved.
Textbooks

William F. Punch, The Practice of Computing Using Python, 3rd Edition, 2017, Pearson

Mark Lutz, Learning Python, 5th Edition, 2013, O’Reilly Media

William Wesley McKinney, Python for Data Analysis, 2nd edition, 2017, O’Reilly Media

Sebastian Raschka, Python Machine Learning, 2017, 2nd edition, Packt Publishing

Proposed Weekly Schedule

Week Topic

1 Course Introduction & Programming Basics

2 Operators

3 Control and Function

4 Data Types Processing

5 Data Structures

6 Connecting to External Data Source

7 Data Preparation and Descriptive Analysis

Recess Week

8 Overview of Programming Languages

9 Multivariate Analysis

10 Machine Learning

11 Neural Networks

12 Project Presentation

13 Course Debrief

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Distributed by Nanyang Business School, Nanyang Technological University. All Rights Reserved.