274 Data & Programming for Analytics

Course Overview
The volume of data being generated every day continues to grow exponentially. We
capture and store data about pretty much every aspect of our lives. Being able to
handle and analyze the available data is now a fundamental skill for everyone. The
objective of this course is to challenge and teach students how to handle data that come
in a variety of forms and sizes. This course guides students through the whole data
management process, from initial data acquisition to final data analysis. The (tentative)
list of topics that we plan to cover:

• Regular expressions
• Accessing data sources: Crawling, parsing HTML, APIs
• Relational databases and SQL
• Data cleaning, processing and manipulation using Pandas
• Basic statistical inference models
• Principles in random experiment design
• Basic predictive modeling techniques
• Textual data and natural language processing tools
• Visualization

Course Objectives
At the completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Retrieve and manage data coming in a variety of formats and from different
sources
• Store and query data in relational databases
• Assess the quality of the data and perform data cleaning operations
• Handle unstructured and textual data, for applications such as sentiment
analysis and topic detection
• Visualize and effectively present data
• Build simple predictive models and statistical inference models

The python packages that we plan to use intensively throughout this course:

• Numpy
• Pandas
• Matplotlib
• Statsmodels
• Scikit learn
 • Beautiful soup
• Sqlite3

There are other packages that we might use in several sessions depending on the
topics.

Prerequisites
The course will be hands-on. Most of the sessions will have an in-class lab session.
We will be just dealing with data. Students that enroll in the class are expected to have
some basic familiarity with programming. Students that have no prior programming
experience can learn the basics of Python on their own (see the useful resources
below), e.g., by reading a book or by taking an online course. We do not expect to tutor
students on the basics of Python; we will rather focus on leveraging the Python
ecosystem and libraries to accomplish various data management tasks. Since this is a
hands-on class, you are expected to bring your laptop to every class (and remember to
charge it, so that it lasts for the duration of the class).

Course Materials
Useful Resources for Learning Python:

• Data Camp
• Coursera
• Udemy

Optional Readings
• Python Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science, 2nd Ed. 2nd
Edition, by John Zelle (Author), ISBN-10: 1590282418
• Mining the Social Web: Data Mining Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+,
GitHub, and MoreSecond Edition Edition, by Matthew A. Russell (Author)

Grading
Class Participation 10%

Homework Assignments 40%

Midterm Exam 20%

Final Group Project 30%

TOTAL 100%

The Canvas Classes site for this course will contain lecture notes, reading materials,
assignments, and late-breaking news. You should check the site daily, and I will
assume that you have read all announcements and class discussion.

Class Participation (10%)

Students are expected to attend all classes, participate regularly in the large class
discussion, and small group discussions.

We will be using Piazza for class discussion. The system is highly catered to getting you
help fast and efficiently from classmates, the TA, and myself. Rather than emailing
questions to the teaching staff, I encourage you to post your questions on Piazza. If you
have any problems or feedback for the developers, email team@piazza.com.

Find our class signup link at: https://piazza.com/uci/winter2021/mgmtmba274

Access Code: MBA274

Please register Piazza using your UCI email and use your name as shown on Canvas
when choosing your Piazza username. We will calculate your participation score partly
based on your participation on Piazza.

If you have questions about class material or homework that you do not want to ask in
class, or that would take us well off topic, please first ask on the discussion board
(Piazza). Posting on Piazza is much better than sending emails in certain scenarios. If
you have the question, someone else may too and everyone may benefit from the
answers being available on the discussion board on Piazza. Also, please try to answer
your classmates’ questions. In grading your class participation I will include your
contributions to the Piazza discussion board. Your answers and follow-up discussions
should demonstrate your critical thinking in solving the questions.

I will check my email at least once a day. Your email will get my priority if you
include the special tag [MBA274] in the email subject header. I use this tag to make
sure to process class email first. If you do not include the special tag, I may not read the
email for a while. If you forget and send without the tag and then remember, just send it
again including the tag.

Homework Assignments (40%)

Part of this course involves working with others and seeking feedback from your peers
on your in-class exercises. A large portion of the class requires you to actually work with
data and visualization tools to create visual displays. There are regular exercises and
assignments to help you practice and learn the appropriate techniques. These exercises
are short but frequent.

Homework assignments consist two formats - individual assignment and group

assignment. Each homework assignment comprises questions to be answered and/or
hands-on tasks. For individual assignments, except as explicitly noted otherwise (see
next paragraph), you are expected to complete your assignments on your own—without
interacting with on the completion of your assignment. You are free of course to discuss
the concepts with your classmates, and to discuss similar problems to the ones in the
homework.

For the hands-on parts of the assignments, you are encouraged to work with your group
members and other classmates to understand how to get Python to do what you need
to do, and then to complete your assignment on your own. So, for example, you could
have a classmate help you do something similar, such that then you would be able to
complete the assignment.

With the support of me, the TA, and your classmates, we operate under a “diligent
attempt but limited frustration” policy: (1) If you get stuck on something, spend some
time Googling to try to find the answer. If you seem to be moving forward, keep going.
That search and discovery will pay off, both in terms of the direct learning about how to
do what you need to do, and also in terms of your learning how to find such things out.
(E.g., if you don’t know what stackoverflow is, you will learn!). But, (2) limit frustration—
start your assignments early enough that if you run into a wall, you can just stop
searching and ask about it. Let’s say, if you feel like you have not moved forward after
15 minutes of being stuck, just stop and ask: your classmates, on the Piazza, or your
TA. If you don’t get a solution, escalate it to me.

Completed assignments must be handed online prior to the start of class on the due
date, unless otherwise indicated. Assignments will be graded and returned promptly.
Answers to homework questions should be well thought out and communicated
precisely and professionally, avoiding sloppy language, poor diagrams, and irrelevant
discussion.

The hands-on tasks in the homework will be based on data that we will provide. You will
mine the data to get hands-on experience in formulating problems and using the various
techniques discussed in class. You will use these data to build and evaluate predictive
models.

For the hands-on assignments you will use Python and its data
science/analytics/visualization libraries. On Canvas, there are installation instructions to
make sure that you have all the required libraries, as well as tutorials.
Assignments up to 24 hours late will have their grade reduced by 50%. After 24 hours,
late assignments will receive no credit. Please turn in your assignment early if there is
any uncertainty about your ability to turn it in on time.

Midterm (20%)
There will be a midterm exam towards the second half of the quarter. More instructions
will be discussed in class.

Final Group Project (30%)

There will be a final term project prepared by student teams. Teams are encouraged to
interact with the instructor and TA electronically or face-to-face in developing their
project reports. You will submit various milestone deliverables through the course. We
will discuss the project requirements in class.

Any questions regarding grades on homework, midterm and the final project must be
raised within one week after the grades are released.

Acknowledgements
This course is a fusion of similar courses offered at Simon School of Business,
University of Rochester; Stern School of Business, NYU, University of Chicago. Special
thanks to Rajeev Dewan, Foster Provost and Panos Ipeirotis for the foundations they
and others have laid in the teaching of Business Analytics.

Course Schedule (Subject to change during the quarter)

Session Topics

Week 1 Python Basics (Variables, String, Lists)

Jan. 7 Readings: Think Python (Links to an external site.) (or other
similar introductory book on Python, i.e. Introducing Python.pdf
Chapter 1&2)
Week 2 Python Basics (Dictionaries, Tuples, Sets, List Comprehension)
Jan. 14 Readings: Think Python (Links to an external site.) (or other
similar introductory book on Python, i.e. Introducing Python.pdf
Chapter 3)

Week 3 Python Basics (Control Structure, Functions)

Jan. 21 Readings: Introducing Python.pdf Chapter 4

Week 4 Exploratory Data Analysis

Jan. 28 Lab: processing files and plotting using pandas and matplotlib
Readings: Pandas Documentation (Links to an external site.)

Week 5 Data Management Systems and MySql

Feb. 4 Lab: access and manipulate data using sqlite
Readings: Learning_SQL.pdf Chapter 1- 5

Week 6 Statistical Inference

Feb. 11 Lab: analyzing consumer churn using ols and logit models from
statsmodels
Readings:
casella_berger_statistical_inference.pdf Chapter 12
Predicting Customer Churn At QWE.pdf
Modeling Discrete Choice Categorical Dependent Variables
Logistic Regression and MLE.pdf

Week 7 Machine Learning

Feb. 18 Lab: scikit learn
Readings: Machine Learning Chapters 12, 13, 14 & 8
 Week 8 Midterm
Feb. 25 Visualization

Week 9 Natural Language Processing – classification

Mar. 4 Lab: text analysis and sentiment analysis using scikit learn;
visualization using matplotlib, plotly and cufflinks

Week 10 Final Project Presentation

Mar. 11
Showcase your data science project

Note: each session will be split into two half sessions – the first half is a lecture on a
specific topic and the other half is a lab session where real-life datasets from business,
biology and other disciplines will be analyzed using Python.