Data Literacy: Making Better Business Decisions With Data

Classroom

You want to know if that social media strategy is working? Look at the data. You want to predict customer behavior? Look at the data. After this course you will be able to use the data your company collects to ask and answer important business questions.

The ability to analyze data is a sought after skill. I should know, I got my first job working for American Express when I was 18 because I had the skills I'm teaching in this class. Decisions are made based on data more and more. If you want to be a decision maker, or have the knowledge to incluence decision makers, you need to know how to analyze data.

This four class series will turn even the most math phobic person into a stats nerd. Data is the way of the future. Even if you don’t plan to become a statistician (though this would be a great first course if you do – trust me, I’m awesome at teaching), you should learn to be data literate to sift through the nonsense and know a charlatan when you see one.

We will also cover the basics of R, a very powerful and versatile open source tool (download it for free). Please come with R and RStudio loaded on your laptop if you’d like to follow along. Don’t worry if you don’t have a laptop – you can watch in class and I’ll send you the command lines to look over at home on your Commodore 64 (though I’m not guaranteeing R is Commodore compatible).

Topics we will cover include:

Hypothesis testing
Statistical significance
Statistical power
t-tests
ANOVA
Correlation
Regression

Prerequisites

Prerequisites: Don’t let your fear of math stop you from being great at stats! All of the math you need for this course you learned by the 10th grade (if you were slow – 8th grade for the rest of us).