DATA ANALYTICS PROJECT – PART 2
You must complete a final Business Analytics Project that addresses a business problem using the tools learned in this course along with real-world data. Research topics should emulate a real life situation for which a company/organization might seek an answer and chose to perform analysis to evaluate alternative courses of action. Your project must go beyond using solely Excel functionality and utilize one of the analytics tools of this course – linear programming, simulation, decision trees, or data mining. Further it should incorporate visualization to tell your story.
Your project topic must be approved by the instructor. Each part of the Business Analytics project is detailed below. Possible topics may include any of the applications covered in this course but you are encouraged to look for a topic that is relevant to an organization with which you are involved.
Each part of the project must be submitted based on the course schedule provided. All parts are to be electronically submitted using the Blackboard site. An assignment structure with grading elements will be provided on the course Blackboard site. There are four parts to this project as described below:
Part 2 – Data Discovery and Preliminary Data Analysis (10% of final grade)
For this part of the assignment, you need to complete an in-depth analysis of the data sources and elements you will use for your project. Data discovery involves identifying potential sources of the data you need and narrowing down to those sources that are relevant and can be obtained. Preliminary data analysis involves a careful examination of the data you identify to ensure its quality and to ensure that it is relevant to the business problem you are analyzing.
Your submission should be three to four double-spaced pages, not including data tables and charts which should be placed in a properly titled appendix with each table or chart labeled appropriately and referenced in the paper. Your submission must include the following sections:
• Cover Page to include the Title of the Research Project, your name, etc.
• Data Discover and Preliminary Data Analysis
o Data Sources: Identify each data source to be used in your analysis. Identify the business source of its origin and discuss its relevance to the project in terms of the business source originating it. There is no need to discuss data sources you evaluated but are not being used for the analysis.
o Data Elements: Define each data element used in the analysis and its relevance to the analysis. This may be done in a table and placed in the appendix if it is lengthy.
o Data Quality: Discuss the quality of the data sources and elements you will be using in terms of relevance to the business problem, completeness, and correctness. State how any issues with data quality will impact the applicability of your analysis.
o Descriptive Statistics: Provide basic descriptive statistics such as means, variances, data distributions, etc. that allow you to understand if there are outliers or issues to be dealt with in your data.
• Managerial Summary: What is your overall assessment of the data sources, their availability, their quality, and how will they allow you to address the problem you’ve chosen?
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