Analytics for Decision Making Specialization

Welcome to Introduction to Predictive Modeling, the first course in the University of Minnesota’s Analytics for Decision Making specialization.

This course will introduce to you the concepts, processes, and applications of predictive modeling, with a focus on linear regression and time series forecasting models and their practical use in Microsoft Excel. By the end of the course, you will be able to: - Understand the concepts, processes, and applications of predictive modeling. - Understand the structure of and intuition behind linear regression models. - Be able to fit simple and multiple linear regression models to data, interpret the results, evaluate the goodness of fit, and use fitted models to make predictions. - Understand the problem of overfitting and underfitting and be able to conduct simple model selection. - Understand the concepts, processes, and applications of time series forecasting as a special type of predictive modeling. - Be able to fit several time-series-forecasting models (e.g., exponential smoothing and Holt-Winter’s method) in Excel, evaluate the goodness of fit, and use fitted models to make forecasts. - Understand different types of data and how they may be used in predictive models. - Use Excel to prepare data for predictive modeling, including exploring data patterns, transforming data, and dealing with missing values. This is an introductory course to predictive modeling. The course provides a combination of conceptual and hands-on learning. During the course, we will provide you opportunities to practice predictive modeling techniques on real-world datasets using Excel. To succeed in this course, you should know basic math (the concept of functions, variables, and basic math notations such as summation and indices) and basic statistics (correlation, sample mean, standard deviation, and variance). This course does not require a background in programming, but you should be familiar with basic Excel operations (e.g., basic formulas and charting). For the best experience, you should have a recent version of Microsoft Excel installed on your computer (e.g., Excel 2013, 2016, 2019, or Office 365).

In this data-driven world, companies are often interested in knowing what is the "best" course of action, given the data. For example, manufacturers need to decide how many units of a product to produce given the estimated demand and raw material availability? Should they make all the products in-house or buy some from a third-party to meet the demand? Prescriptive Analytics is the branch of analytics that can provide answers to these questions. It is used for prescribing data-based decisions. The most important method in the prescriptive analytics toolbox is optimization. This course will introduce students to the basic principles of linear optimization for decision-making. Using practical examples, this course teaches how to convert a problem scenario into a mathematical model that can be solved to get the best business outcome. We will learn to identify decision variables, objective function, and constraints of a problem, and use them to formulate and solve an optimization problem using Excel solver and spreadsheet.

Business analysts need to be able to prescribe optimal solution to problems. But analytics courses are often focused on training students in data analysis and visualization, not so much in helping them figure out how to take the available data and pair that with the right mathematical model to formulate a solution. This course is designed to connect data and models to real world decision-making scenarios in manufacturing, supply chain, finance, human resource management, etc. In particular, we understand how linear optimization - a prescriptive analytics method - can be used to formulate decision problems and provide data-based optimal solutions. Throughout this course we will work on applied problems in different industries, such as:

(a) Finance Decisions: How should an investment manager create an optimal portfolio that maximizes net returns while not taking too much risks across various investments? (b) Production Decisions: Given projected demand, supply of raw materials, and transportation costs, what would be the optimal volume of products to manufacture at different plant locations? (c) HR Decisions: How many workers need to be hired or terminated over a planning horizon to minimize cost while meeting operational needs of a company? (c) Manufacturing: What would be the profit maximizing product mix that should be produced, given the raw material availability and customer demand? We will learn how to formulate these problems as mathematical models and solve them using Excel spreadsheet.