Part-time Master of Business Analytics

The subjects within the Master of Business Analytics are technical and assume rudimentary background knowledge in mathematics, statistics and programming. And while most applicants will have reasonable working knowledge in one or more of these areas, we appreciate that some may also be ‘rusty’ with some of this content. We therefore recommend that any applicant undertaking subjects requiring such preliminary knowledge attend the accelerators.

The accelerators run over 2-3 days prior to the beginning of the course and establish the fundamentals in mathematics, statistics and programming that are called upon in many of the subjects within the masters.

Content covered in the accelerators may include concepts within the following areas:

Mathematics: Calculus and Linear Algebra

Statistics: Probability, Distributions, Sample Statistics and Inference

Programming: Variables, Booleans, Functions and Loops

Business Data Platforms

Data warehouses are designed to provide organisations with an integrated set of high-quality data to support decisionmakers. They should support flexible and multi-dimensional retrieval and analysis of data. Topics covered include data warehousing and decision-making; data warehouse design; data warehouse implementation; data sourcing and quality; online analytical processing (OLAP); dashboards; data warehousing for customer relationship management; and case studies of data warehousing practice.

Coding for Business Problems

Solving problems in business often requires computer programming to manipulate, analyse, and visualise data. This component helps students with little or no background in computer programming, learn how to design and write programs using a high-level procedural programming language, and to solve problems using these skills. Topics such as cyber security, cyberethics and privacy, regarding the collection of individual data, will also be discussed.

Decision Making and Optimisation

There are an assortment of mathematical methods to obtain efficient solutions to a large variety of complex business problems. This component helps student formulate a business problem as a mathematical model and then use computational techniques to estimate and solve the model. Topics covered may include decision-making under uncertainty, optimal location allocation of resources in business processes, decision trees, linear programming, integer linear programming, and Monte Carlo simulations.

Statistical Learning for Business

With the explosion of available data, statistical learning, which refers to the analysis of complex datasets, has become an important field in many business contexts, including marketing, finance, and even human resource management. The aim of this component, and the follow-on component in Advanced Business Analytics, is to help students learn how to extract relevant information from large amounts of complex data to make improved business decisions. Topics covered in this component include data exploration; resampling methods; linear and nonlinear regression; parametric classification techniques; and model selection.

Machine Learning and AI for Business

This component builds on the material in Statistical Learning and covers advanced analytic methods. It extends the statistical-learning component of Foundations of Business Analytics in three ways. First, new techniques such as tree-based methods and neural networks are introduced. Second, students will be introduced to unsupervised statistical-learning techniques, and third, students will learn how to combine models and techniques to produce ensembles with better predictive capabilities.

Causal Analytics for Business

Data Analytics models can be used to predict a performance variable. But many business decisions are not about predicting performance per se. They are about choosing the values of key inputs, such as price or advertising spend, to optimise performance. This requires that the effects of the inputs, as coded by the model, are causal. This typically requires further assumptions about how the data was generated. The gold standard for establishing causality is a randomised experiment, which is becoming more common in business contacts. The course covers basic principles and practice of experimentation from A-B testing to randomised incomplete block designs. All these methods give rise to estimates of causal effects.

Predictive Business Analytics

Predicting key business and economic variables is increasingly important, as it drives both objective decision-making and improved profitability. This component aims to cover the main methods used to predict business and economic variables, based on historical data. These methods include traditional regression, time series, multivariate and econometric models, as well as emerging methods, such as ensemble forecasts. Both point and density prediction will be considered, along with metrics for the quality of both. Throughout, the focus will be on introducing methods in the context of substantive business and economic problems, using a wide range of prediction methods. The importance of benchmarking different methodologies, and the use of prediction in decision-making frameworks, will also be stressed.

Text Analytics for Business

This component helps students develop an understanding of the key algorithms used in natural-language processing and text retrieval for use in a diverse range of applications, including search engines, cross-language information retrieval, machine translation, text mining, question answering, summarisation, and grammar correction. Topics to be covered include text normalisation; sentence boundary detection; part-of-speech tagging; n-gram language modelling; sentiment analysis; web mining and analysis; network analysis (including social network analysis); and text classification.

Marketing Analytics

It has become increasingly important to know how marketing actions translate into revenue and profit growth. The tools that enable this translation are part of the toolkit called ’marketing analytics’. Marketing analytics is a technology enabled and model-supported approach to harness customer and market data and enhance marketing decision-making. This component of Module 5 provides students with (i) knowledge of marketing analytics, (ii) the ability to know which analytics tools to use for which marketing problems, (iii) the ability to use those tools to solve marketing problems, and (iv) the ability to influence marketing outcomes such as satisfaction, choice, loyalty, word of mouth, and customer referrals.

Supply Chain Analytics

Rapid advancements in technology (particularly the internet), combined with fast and cheap computing power, has enable firms to radically transform their industries by developing business models and re-engineering their supply chains. This component provides students with (i) knowledge of mathematical modelling and analytic tools, relating to logistics and supply chain optimisation problems, (ii) the ability to use these tools and techniques to analyse strategic, tactical and operational decisions, pertaining to inventory management, facility location, logistics and other supply chain, management-related decisions, and (iii) exposure to real world logistics and supply chain decisions through case studies.

Option 1

Applied Business Analytics

To gain practical experience, students will work on a data project with a group. The 10-week project integrates academic learning and practical challenges in implementing data analytics in an organisational context. While undertaking this project, students will examine the ethics surrounding data and data-based decision making and undertake a practical introduction to workplace negotiations.

and;

Risk Analytics

Quantitative analytics have become an invaluable part of managing financial institutions, not only for profitability but also for safeguarding the organisation against risk. In this component, students will be applying data-analytic skills to finance applications. Topics include financial performance benchmarking; modelling and computation of financial risks; dynamic portfolio management; computational derivative pricing; and modelling fixed income securities. The focus of the component will be on both theoretical development and practical implementation, using contemporary data from the financial market.

Option 2

Individual Research Project