7CS512 — Business Analytics

Overview

This postgraduate module develops the analytical thinking and technical skills needed to extract value from business data. Students progress from data management and visualisation through descriptive, diagnostic, and predictive analytics, with hands-on work in SAS and Python. The module concludes with topics in classification, clustering, and the ethical governance of data-driven decision-making.

Topics

• Introduction to business analytics: scope, value, and the analytics lifecycle
• Business analytics in organisations: strategy, roles, and real-world applications
• Data management and pre-processing: quality, transformation, and preparation
• Data visualisation and communicating insight for business impact
• Descriptive and diagnostic analytics
• Reporting and advanced tabulation with SAS PROC TABULATE
• SQL for business analytics
• Predictive analytics and regression techniques
• Classification for business analytics
• Clustering and unsupervised learning in business contexts
• Ethics, governance, and responsible analytics

Companion notebooks

The Python side of this module is supported by two open courses on the teaching page, with hands-on notebooks that run in Google Colab. They are general courses, not tied to this module, but the table shows where to look for each topic.

Topic	Open course	Notebooks
Data management and pre-processing	From Python to Deep Learning and Fine-Tuning	6
Data visualisation	From Python to Deep Learning and Fine-Tuning	7
SQL for business analytics	From One Table to a Cluster	1, 2
The analytics workflow and evaluating models	From Python to Deep Learning and Fine-Tuning	8
Predictive analytics and regression	From Python to Deep Learning and Fine-Tuning	9
Classification	From Python to Deep Learning and Fine-Tuning	10
Clustering and unsupervised learning	From Python to Deep Learning and Fine-Tuning	11

The notebooks do not cover SAS, the organisational side of analytics, or ethics and governance.