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Analytics: The Power of Data for Businesses

Become a Summer Trojan and earn college credit.

How does TikTok know what videos to show you? How is Tesla getting cars to drive themselves? How does Amazon deliver your order the next day? Business analytics and data are transforming modern firms and disrupting entire industries. This creates an increased need for people who understand what analytics can and cannot do, how to ask the right questions and, most importantly, how to interpret data to make better decisions. In this course, you’ll learn fundamental techniques businesses use and get hands-on experience manipulating data yourself.

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Program Overview

In “Analytics: The Power of Data for Businesses,” you will learn how to organize and clean data so it is ready for analysis, visualize data and draw insights from those visualizations.

The course also covers algorithms that businesses use to classify and cluster data to predict future behavior and identify target markets. Like data in the real world, this class will bring together many different subjects: statistics, finance, marketing, operations, communications, economics and accounting.

You’ll discover how data-driven decision making can be useful in all of these disciplines and learn to think laterally across these disciplines to solve problems. Ultimately, you will gain a data analyst’s eye, keen to find opportunities to apply these algorithms to the world around you.

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Key Information

Topics of Study

Data interpretation and insight generation
Key performance indicators (KPIs)
Data visualization
Predictive analysis
Unsupervised learning
Market segmentation
Experimental design
A/B testing
Analytical communication
Data judgment and ethics

Learning Highlights

Understand where and how data analysis is used in business
Think analytically about business problems
Select and apply core analytical techniques
Interpret and communicate data effectively
Integrate analytics across business functions
Evaluate the strength and limitations of data evidence
Bridge quantitative insights and business judgment

Requirements

Students must bring their own laptops
Students should be proficient in high school-level math. Calculus is not required.

Week	Focus	Key Topics	Assignments and Activities
1	KPIs and Dashboarding	Converting raw data into manageable insights; determining correct data to measure and track; communicating data to stakeholders	Understand how data is used in business with trips to companies like the Dodgers, Google, LA City Hall and more. Infographic creation project. Business pitch competition.
2	Classification	Making predictions with historical data	Introduction to programming in Python. Use LLMs to assist in coding. Generate your own classification tools.
3	Clustering	Finding and deriving insights from hidden structures in data	Implement clustering algorithms of your own.
4	A/B Testing	Combining data and experimentation to incrementally improve a business model	Explore A/B testing methodologies and the cutting-edge work of LLMs incorporated into A/B tests. Learn multi-arm bandit strategies for testing multiple things online simultaneously.

The most valuable aspect of this course for me would be the ways in which Dr. Charlie taught us to see patterns in the data that we would analyze. This changed the way I see the world…

— USC Summer Programs student participant