MBA 550 Visualization

Fall, 2018

Dale Lehman

 

Office:  Keane 309;  Dale.Lehman@loras.edu, 563-588-7725

The course meets Tuesday evenings, 6:30-8:30PM online Sept 18 - October 23 and in class September 8-9 (whole weekend)

Course Objective and Description: 

This course explores visualization methods and their use in cleaning data, analyzing data, and presenting data analysis results.  A wide variety of visualization types will be considered, including graphs and tables.  Toolls used in the course include JMP, Tableau, and Microsoft BI.  Stories are powerful and the usefulness of data analysis often hinges on the visualizations that are used to communicate the results.  The analysis itself depends on appropriate use of visuals to understand the data, ask meaningful questions, and appropriately prepare the data for analysis.  While stories are critical, it is important that you end with the story and not begin with it.  In other words, let the evidence speak before deciding what it says.  Much of this course will be devoted to ways to do this.

Textbook:

Data Mining for Business Analytics, by Shmueli, Bruce, Stephens, and Patel, Wiley, 2017

Grading: 

There will be a number of homework assignments, comprising 2/3 of your grade, including discussion of the problems in class. The other third of the grade will depend on group cases that we will conduct in class..   Homework (partial or whole) may be resubmitted any time before the end of the course for an improved grade (half credit for resubmissions).  My grading standards are

A:  demonstrate a command of the tools.  This does not mean it is perfect nor does it mean that it matches what I would do.  It means that you clearly understand what the tools mean and how to use them.

B:  You have control of the tools, but not a command.  This means there were too many errors or omissions to qualify as a command.

C:  The effort is clear, but the tools seem to be controlling you rather than the reverse.

D:  The effort is not evident.

F:  You have convinced me that you did not try.

Outline:  available on eLearn