Course Summary: Business Intelligence and Analytics 🎓📊
Instructor: Saji K Matu — Professor, Department of Management Studies, IIT Madras
Audience: Friends and learners interested in analytics for business decision-making
Course Overview ✅
- Focuses on the life-cycle approach to analytics: from data → infrastructure → analytics → business action.
- Emphasizes business perspective: insights must be actionable and support decision-makers.
Key Concepts 📌
- Datafication: Converting thoughts into data, and data into insights via algorithms (e.g., Twitter → text data → insights).
- Data as raw material: Data is likened to oil for driving business.
Course Structure (Life-cycle) 🔁
- Data
- Sources and nature (structured/unstructured).
- Data Management & Infrastructure
- Databases → Data warehouses
- Integration tools and architecture for Business Intelligence (BI)
- Descriptive Analytics
- SQL queries, multi-dimensional queries, OLAP
- Data visualization
- Focus on real-life business problems and manager queries (marketing, operations)
- Explanatory & Predictive Analytics
- Data mining techniques
- Converting business problems into analytics problems
- Variable selection, model building, interpretation, prediction
- Advanced Techniques
- Regression (explanatory)
- Classification (supervised & unsupervised)
- Machine learning models (including for financial/time-series)
- Unstructured Data Analytics
- Text mining and related techniques
Skills and Outcomes 🎯
- Translate business questions into analytics problems.
- Manage and integrate data across systems.
- Run descriptive analyses (SQL, OLAP, visualizations).
- Build and interpret explanatory/predictive models (regression, classification, ML).
- Analyze unstructured text data.
- Communicate actionable insights to decision-makers.
Principles & Practical Focus 🛠️
- Real-life, business-centric problems rather than textbook exercises.
- Iterative process: insights inform decisions; results may require reworking analytics strategy.
- Emphasis on interpretation, communication, and actionability of results.
Invitation
- Students are welcome to enroll. Thank you! 🙏