BUSINESS ANALYTICS & DECISION MAKING
INSTRUCTOR: SYED MUHAMAMD ALI FAISAL
Program: EMBA
Department Offering: Business Analytics & Decision Making
Class ERP Number:
Faculty: Mr. S.M. Ali Faisal
Class details
9:30 a.m. to 12:45 p.m. Main Campus
Class Timing and Room
Session Days 14 Sessions
Credit Hours: 3 Credit Hours
Email mafaisal@iba.edu.pk
Contact # +92-333-2477775
Course TA N/A
Course Description:
In this comprehensive course on Business Analytics & Decision Making, students will gain
essential skills to harness the power of data-driven insights in the corporate world. This
hands-on program is designed to equip learners with the knowledge and tools needed to
make informed, strategic decisions that drive business success.
Throughout the course, participants will explore various statistical and analytical techniques to
extract meaningful patterns and trends from vast datasets. They will learn how to leverage
cutting-edge software and tools to analyze data, interpret results, and create actionable
reports.
Reference Book: Lean Analytics by Allistar Kroll & Ben Yoskovitz
Class 1: Understanding Businesss Metrics & KPIs
● Introduction to Analytics
● Identifing the right KPI for the business
● Rates & Ratios Over Sums and Averages
● Devising strategy for improving business metrics (CIRCLES Method)
● Vanity Metrics | What not to do
Keywords: Growth, Engagement, Retention, Churn, ARPU, Segmentation
Assignment: Each student will be given a business problem to improve feature, diagnose
problem or increase revenue, student will have to prepare 3 minute presentation
Class 2: Cloud & Datawarehousing
Relational Database
How datawarehouses store data
OLTP V OLAP
AWS | Google Cloud | Snowflake
Centralization V Decentralization in cloud
SQL for Analytics (Texas Deathrow Case Study)
Class 3: Insights & Discovery (I)
● Introduction to Python
Understaind Data Types + basic syntax
Continious Vs Categorical Data
Data structrues (Lists + Dictionaries)
Using pandas to read datasets for analysis
Class 4: Insights & Discovery II (Exploratory Data Analysis)
● Case study - Titanic Surviors (Dataset to be shared with class)
Univariate Analysis
● Data Summary (Mean | Median | Stdv)
● Distribution Check
● Outlier detection
Multivariate Analysis
● Corrleations
● Grouped effects
● Correlations Vs Causations
Assignment: similar dataset will be shared with questions students are suppose to use python to
extract and analyze the answers
Class 5: Concreteness & Sanity Checks (Transofrming data for most accurate answers)
● Hands on interactive class with following exercises
Missing value imputation
Data transformation (Units | currency | point based systems)
Pivoting & collapsing tables
Binning
Class 6: Statistical Anlaysis for Decision Making (I)
● Sample Data Vs Population Data
● Central Limit Theorm
● Confidence Intervals
Class 7: Statistical Anlaysis for Decision Making (II)
● What the heck are p-values?
● All about A/B Tests
Importance
Designing A/B Tests
Conducting A/B tests
Results Interpretation
Assignment: Dataset will be shared with class with instructions to perform statistical anlaysis
Class 8: Story-telling with Data (I):
● Types of Data visualizations (Hands-ON)
Bar Chart (Simple | Side by side | Stacked Bar Chart)
Line charts (Trends & Seasonality)
Box Plots (Interpreting Interquartile range)
Scatter Plots (Finding correlations)
Heat-maps
Geomaps
Pie / Donut Charts
Bubble chart | Word Clouds
KPI Charts
Class 9: Story-telling with Data (II):
● Advance Analytics & Visualization techniques:
Ranks & Index
Filtering & Sorting
Top N | Bottom N
Level of Detail | Custom Calculations
● Case Study
Customer Retention (Life Time value)
RFM (Customer Segmentation)
Class 10: Story-telling with Data (III):
● Dashboarding Principles
Level of detail
Formatting rules
Pre-attentive attributes
Adding dynamic functionality to dashboards
Story telling and contextualization through dashboards
Assignment: Students to create their own dashboard and present in class
Class 11: Machine Learning For Analysts (I)
Dataset: Boston House pricing
● Linear Regression (Numericals)
● Multiple linear regression
● Interpreting results
● ANOVA
● SSE | MSE | RMSE
Class 12: Machine Learning for Analysts (II)
Dataset: E-commerce customer data
● Introduction to K-means
● Numericals
Class 13: Time series forecasting
● Date time manipulation in python
● Moving averages
● Exponential smoothing
● ARIMA
Class 14: Conlcusion & Career Counselling Session
● Future of Analytics
● Available market
● Leveraging AI to answer business questions (Chat GPT tutorial)
● Guest Speaker Session
