Description
Extensive interviews with executives from successful firms find that companies today require decision makers who understand the value of analytics, can identify opportunities and know how best to apply data analytics to enhance business performance.
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE WITH DATA MINING
FALL 2012
PROFESSOR MAYTAL SAAR-TSECHANSKY
Data Mining: MIS 373/MKT 372
Professor Maytal Saar-Tsechansky
UTC 1.146
”For every leader in the company, not just for me, there are decisions that can be made by
analysis. These are the best kinds of decisions. They’re fact-based decisions.” Amazon’s
CEO, Jeff Bezos.
In the January 2006 Harvard Business Review issue, Professor Thomas Davenport and
colleagues document the emergence of a new form of competition based on the extensive use
of analytics, data, and fact-based decision making. In virtually every industry, the authors found
the competitive strategies organizations are employing today rely extensively on data analysis to
predict the consequences of alternative courses of action, and to guide executive decision
making, more generally. Extensive interviews with executives from successful firms find that
companies today require decision makers who understand the value of analytics, can
identify opportunities and know how best to apply data analytics to enhance business
performance. The spreading of analytical competition spans industries—from consumer finance
to retailing to travel and entertainment to consumer good, and even professional sports teams.
This course provides a comprehensive introduction to data mining problems and tools to enhance
managerial decision making at all levels of the organization and across business units. We
discuss scenarios from a variety of business disciplines, including the use of data mining to
support customer relationship management (CRM) decisions, decisions in the entertainment
industry, finance, and professional sports teams.
The three main goals of the course are to enable students to:
1. Approach business problems data-analytically by identifying opportunities to derive
business value from data mining.
2. Interact competently on the topic of data-driven business intelligence. Know the basics of
data mining techniques and how they can be applied to interact effectively with CTOs, expert data
miners, and business analysts. This competence will also allow you to envision data-mining
opportunities.
3. Acquire some hands-on experience so as to follow up on ideas or opportunities that present
themselves.
Reading Materials and Resources
1. Textbook: Data Mining Techniques, Second Edition by Michael Berry and Gordon Linoff
Wiley, 2004 ISBN: 0-471-47064-3
2. Additional reading materials will be available on blackboard.
Software: WEKA (award-winning, open source software tool)
Course Requirements and Grading
Style
This is a lecture-style course, however student participation is important. Students are required to
be prepared and read the material before class. Students are required to attend all sessions and
discuss with the instructor any absence from class. We will also have several guest speakers
from a variety of industries who will discuss how they apply data mining techniques to boost
business performance.
Individual assignments
Individual assignments address the materials discussed in class as well as aim to help you
develop hands-on experience analyzing business data with a data mining software tool.
Assignments will be announced in class and be posted on blackboard. Students are responsible
to know when assignments are due. The due date of each assignment will be a week from the
day in which it will be announced in class. The due date will be also noted on Blackboard next to
each assignment.
Late assignments
Assignments are due prior to the start of the lecture on the due date. Please turn in your
assignment early if there is any uncertainty about your ability to turn it in on the due date.
Assignments up to one week late will have their grade reduced by 50%. After one week, late
assignments will receive no credit. Legitimate reasons for an inability to submit an assignment on
time must be supported by appropriate documentation. There will be no exceptions.
Quizzes
There will be 4 quizzes during the course of the semester. Please review Quiz dates in the
schedule below. Quizzes will be brief and their objective is to review key concepts introduced in
the recent modules. Format: each student will answer the quiz individually. Students will then be
divided into groups to discuss and retake the quiz as a group. The group discussion will follow by
a review of the correct responses. A correct response by the group will add up to 10 points. Even
if you answered the individual quiz correctly, you will benefit from the extra points. Thus group
discussion can only help all members of the group.
Missed quizzes
If you miss a quiz without excuse, you will receive zero points. Valid excuses for missing a quiz
are, for example, illness, death of a family member, or a meeting with the president. These
excuses will have to be documented. To make up points for an excused absence, you will have a
brief oral exam (15-20 min) with me. You will not receive the team bonus points for the missed
quiz.
Team project
There will be a final term project in which teams can chose between developing a proposal for a
data mining project to address a business problem, or a hands-on data project in which the team
will address a business problem by applying data mining techniques to real business data.
Deliverables:
Each team will hand in a brief report (85%) and prepare a short presentation (15%) of
their work.
Each team member will also provide feedback on the contribution of each of the team
members. Feedback must be provided via email to the instructor by the last day of class.
Your grade for the team project may be raised, decrease or not be affected by your
teammates’ feedback, depending how your performed relative to the other team
members.
Attendance:
Attendance will be taken in each class. Any absence must be supported by a document, such as
from a doctor. Interviews, other class projects, etc. will not be accepted as legitimate reason to
miss a class. There will be no exceptions to this policy.
Grade breakdown:
1. Involvement : Includes attendances, interest and effort: 10%
2. Assignments : 10%
3. Quizzes: 50%
4. Group term project (teams): 30%
Course Materials
All course-related materials, such as handouts, announcements, slides, etc., will be posted on
Blackboard (http://courses.utexas.edu).
Office Hours
Professor Saar-Tsechansky: CBA 5.230, Tuesday 2:30pm-3:30pm and by appointment.
Teaching Assistant: Sam Blazek
Both the TAs and myself are available during posted office hours or at other times by
appointment. Do not hesitate to request an appointment if you cannot make it to the posted office
hours. The most effective way to request an appointment for office hours is to suggest several
times that work for you.
Please note that I will usually not be able to have appointments before 9:00am or after 5:00pm.
Email policy
Emails to me or the TAs should be restricted to organizational issues, such as requests for
appointments, questions about course organization, etc. For all other issues, please see us in
person. Specifically, we will not discuss technical issues related to quizzes or homeworks
per email. Technical issues are questions concerning how to approach a particular problem,
whether a particular solution is correct, or how to use the software. It is Ok to inquire per email if
you suspect that a problem set has a typo or if you find the wording of a problem set ambiguous.
Email: [email protected] ! Begin subject: [DM UNDERGRAD]!
Millennium Lab
The course involves using a Data Mining software for assignments and projects. If you will be
using the Millennium lab, please note the following Spring schedule for the lab.
The Millennium Lab is open every day. It will be closing in the early morning hours, from 1:30AM-
7:30AM, Monday-Thursday. On Friday, the lab will be closing at 9PM and opening again on
Sunday from 3PM-12AM.
McCombs Classroom Professionalism Policy
The highest professional standards are expected of all members of the McCombs community.
The collective class reputation and the value of the McCombs BBA program hinges on this.
Faculty are expected to be professional and prepared to deliver value for each and every class
session. Students are expected to be professional in all respects.
The classroom experience is enhanced when:
• Students arrive on time. On time arrival ensures that classes are able to start and finish at
the scheduled time. On time arrival shows respect for both fellow students and faculty and it
enhances learning by reducing avoidable distractions.
• Students display their name cards. This permits fellow students and faculty to learn
names, enhancing opportunities for community building and evaluation of in-class
contributions.
• Students minimize unscheduled personal breaks. The learning environment improves
when disruptions are limited.
• Students are fully prepared for each class. You will learn most from this class if you work
and submit homework on time, keep up with the content introduced in each session, and
come prepared to class.
• Students respect the views and opinions of their colleagues. Disagreement and debate
are encouraged. Intolerance for the views of others is unacceptable.
• Laptops are closed and put away. When students are surfing the web, responding to e-
mail, instant messaging each other, and otherwise not devoting their full attention to the topic
at hand they are doing themselves and their peers a major disservice.
• Phones and wireless devices are turned off. When a need to communicate with someone
outside of class exists (e.g., for some medical need) please inform the professor prior to
class.
Your professionalism and activity in class contributes to your success in attracting the best faculty
and future students to this program.
Academic Dishonesty
Please keep in mind the McCombs Honor System.
Students with Disabilities
Upon request, the University of Texas at Austin provides appropriate academic accommodations
for qualified students with disabilities. Services for Students with Disabilities (SSD) is housed in
the Office of the Dean of Students, located on the fourth floor of the Student Services Building.
Information on how to register, downloadable forms, including guidelines for documentation,
accommodation request letters, and releases of information are available online at
http://deanofstudents.utexas.edu/ssd/index.php. Please do not hesitate to contact SSD at (512)
471-6259, VP: (512) 232-2937 or via e-mail if you have any questions.
Tentative Course Schedule
Date Topic Readings (text)
8/30 Introduction to the course. Introduction to data mining.
What is data mining? Why now?
Chapters 1 & 2
9/4 Fundamental concepts and definitions:
The data mining process
Data mining predictive and descriptive tasks
Supplement reading :
The KDD process for extracting useful knowledge from volumes of data. Usama Fayyad,
Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro, Padhraic Smyth. Communications of the ACM. Volume 39,
Issue 11 (November 1996). ACM Press New York, NY, USA
(http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/fayyad96kdd.html)
Competing on Analytics by Thomas Davenport. Don Cohen, and Al Jacobson. May 2005
(http://www.babsonknowledge.org/analytics.pdf)
Chapters 1 & 2
9/6 Classification: Recursive partitioning & Decision Trees
Ch 2 pp. 39-42
(revisit), Ch. 6 pp.
165-194, 209.
9/11 Classification: Recursive partitioning & Decision Trees
9/13 Finalize classification trees, inference with trees, inference with missing
values.
9/18 Model Evaluation : Classification accuracy rate, and cost sensitive
evaluation metrics
Ch. 3 pp. 43-54
9/20 Review for Quiz 1
9/22 Quiz 1 (Introduction and classification trees)
9/25 Model Evaluation and Decision Making
Ch. 3 pp. 43-54
9/27 Model Evaluation
Ch. 3 pp. 43-54
10/2 WEKA lab session
10/4 WEKA lab session
10/9 Quiz 2
10/11 Recommender Systems and KNN algorithm
Chapter 8: pp.257-
271
10/16 Recommender systems: Association rules, sequential patterns,
PageRank.
Pages 287-315,
Date Topic Readings
10/18 Recommender systems: Association rules, sequential patterns, PageRank.
Pages 287-
315
10/23 WEKA Lab Session: Basketball memorabilia investment case
10/25 Quiz 3: Recommender Systems: Content-based recommendations and collaborative
filtering
10/30 Decision making using data-driven business intelligence
Evaluating decision making strategies
11/6 WEKA Lab Session: Basketball memorabilia investment case
11/8 Clustering/segmentation analysis
<Intermediate report on term project is due in the beginning of class>
Chapter 11
11/13 WEKA Lab Session: Clustering NBA players
11/15 Quiz 4 : Item-to-item vs. person-to-person recommender systems, network-based
recommendations (Page-rank), clustering, and lessons from the Basketball memorabilia
investment case.
11/20 Text mining and information retrieval: Bayesian learning with applications to spam filtering:
conditional probability, Bayes rule, Naïve Bayes classifier
Ch. 8 pp.
257-271
Additional
readings
on BB
11/22
Thanksgiving Day
11/27
Text mining (continued)
11/29 Optional Make-up Quiz
12/4 Term project report is due in class
Team projects - presentations and discussion
12/6 Feedback on team members’ contributions is due
Team projects - presentations and discussion
doc_262073405.pdf
Extensive interviews with executives from successful firms find that companies today require decision makers who understand the value of analytics, can identify opportunities and know how best to apply data analytics to enhance business performance.
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE WITH DATA MINING
FALL 2012
PROFESSOR MAYTAL SAAR-TSECHANSKY
Data Mining: MIS 373/MKT 372
Professor Maytal Saar-Tsechansky
UTC 1.146
”For every leader in the company, not just for me, there are decisions that can be made by
analysis. These are the best kinds of decisions. They’re fact-based decisions.” Amazon’s
CEO, Jeff Bezos.
In the January 2006 Harvard Business Review issue, Professor Thomas Davenport and
colleagues document the emergence of a new form of competition based on the extensive use
of analytics, data, and fact-based decision making. In virtually every industry, the authors found
the competitive strategies organizations are employing today rely extensively on data analysis to
predict the consequences of alternative courses of action, and to guide executive decision
making, more generally. Extensive interviews with executives from successful firms find that
companies today require decision makers who understand the value of analytics, can
identify opportunities and know how best to apply data analytics to enhance business
performance. The spreading of analytical competition spans industries—from consumer finance
to retailing to travel and entertainment to consumer good, and even professional sports teams.
This course provides a comprehensive introduction to data mining problems and tools to enhance
managerial decision making at all levels of the organization and across business units. We
discuss scenarios from a variety of business disciplines, including the use of data mining to
support customer relationship management (CRM) decisions, decisions in the entertainment
industry, finance, and professional sports teams.
The three main goals of the course are to enable students to:
1. Approach business problems data-analytically by identifying opportunities to derive
business value from data mining.
2. Interact competently on the topic of data-driven business intelligence. Know the basics of
data mining techniques and how they can be applied to interact effectively with CTOs, expert data
miners, and business analysts. This competence will also allow you to envision data-mining
opportunities.
3. Acquire some hands-on experience so as to follow up on ideas or opportunities that present
themselves.
Reading Materials and Resources
1. Textbook: Data Mining Techniques, Second Edition by Michael Berry and Gordon Linoff
Wiley, 2004 ISBN: 0-471-47064-3
2. Additional reading materials will be available on blackboard.
Software: WEKA (award-winning, open source software tool)
Course Requirements and Grading
Style
This is a lecture-style course, however student participation is important. Students are required to
be prepared and read the material before class. Students are required to attend all sessions and
discuss with the instructor any absence from class. We will also have several guest speakers
from a variety of industries who will discuss how they apply data mining techniques to boost
business performance.
Individual assignments
Individual assignments address the materials discussed in class as well as aim to help you
develop hands-on experience analyzing business data with a data mining software tool.
Assignments will be announced in class and be posted on blackboard. Students are responsible
to know when assignments are due. The due date of each assignment will be a week from the
day in which it will be announced in class. The due date will be also noted on Blackboard next to
each assignment.
Late assignments
Assignments are due prior to the start of the lecture on the due date. Please turn in your
assignment early if there is any uncertainty about your ability to turn it in on the due date.
Assignments up to one week late will have their grade reduced by 50%. After one week, late
assignments will receive no credit. Legitimate reasons for an inability to submit an assignment on
time must be supported by appropriate documentation. There will be no exceptions.
Quizzes
There will be 4 quizzes during the course of the semester. Please review Quiz dates in the
schedule below. Quizzes will be brief and their objective is to review key concepts introduced in
the recent modules. Format: each student will answer the quiz individually. Students will then be
divided into groups to discuss and retake the quiz as a group. The group discussion will follow by
a review of the correct responses. A correct response by the group will add up to 10 points. Even
if you answered the individual quiz correctly, you will benefit from the extra points. Thus group
discussion can only help all members of the group.
Missed quizzes
If you miss a quiz without excuse, you will receive zero points. Valid excuses for missing a quiz
are, for example, illness, death of a family member, or a meeting with the president. These
excuses will have to be documented. To make up points for an excused absence, you will have a
brief oral exam (15-20 min) with me. You will not receive the team bonus points for the missed
quiz.
Team project
There will be a final term project in which teams can chose between developing a proposal for a
data mining project to address a business problem, or a hands-on data project in which the team
will address a business problem by applying data mining techniques to real business data.
Deliverables:
Each team will hand in a brief report (85%) and prepare a short presentation (15%) of
their work.
Each team member will also provide feedback on the contribution of each of the team
members. Feedback must be provided via email to the instructor by the last day of class.
Your grade for the team project may be raised, decrease or not be affected by your
teammates’ feedback, depending how your performed relative to the other team
members.
Attendance:
Attendance will be taken in each class. Any absence must be supported by a document, such as
from a doctor. Interviews, other class projects, etc. will not be accepted as legitimate reason to
miss a class. There will be no exceptions to this policy.
Grade breakdown:
1. Involvement : Includes attendances, interest and effort: 10%
2. Assignments : 10%
3. Quizzes: 50%
4. Group term project (teams): 30%
Course Materials
All course-related materials, such as handouts, announcements, slides, etc., will be posted on
Blackboard (http://courses.utexas.edu).
Office Hours
Professor Saar-Tsechansky: CBA 5.230, Tuesday 2:30pm-3:30pm and by appointment.
Teaching Assistant: Sam Blazek
Both the TAs and myself are available during posted office hours or at other times by
appointment. Do not hesitate to request an appointment if you cannot make it to the posted office
hours. The most effective way to request an appointment for office hours is to suggest several
times that work for you.
Please note that I will usually not be able to have appointments before 9:00am or after 5:00pm.
Email policy
Emails to me or the TAs should be restricted to organizational issues, such as requests for
appointments, questions about course organization, etc. For all other issues, please see us in
person. Specifically, we will not discuss technical issues related to quizzes or homeworks
per email. Technical issues are questions concerning how to approach a particular problem,
whether a particular solution is correct, or how to use the software. It is Ok to inquire per email if
you suspect that a problem set has a typo or if you find the wording of a problem set ambiguous.
Email: [email protected] ! Begin subject: [DM UNDERGRAD]!
Millennium Lab
The course involves using a Data Mining software for assignments and projects. If you will be
using the Millennium lab, please note the following Spring schedule for the lab.
The Millennium Lab is open every day. It will be closing in the early morning hours, from 1:30AM-
7:30AM, Monday-Thursday. On Friday, the lab will be closing at 9PM and opening again on
Sunday from 3PM-12AM.
McCombs Classroom Professionalism Policy
The highest professional standards are expected of all members of the McCombs community.
The collective class reputation and the value of the McCombs BBA program hinges on this.
Faculty are expected to be professional and prepared to deliver value for each and every class
session. Students are expected to be professional in all respects.
The classroom experience is enhanced when:
• Students arrive on time. On time arrival ensures that classes are able to start and finish at
the scheduled time. On time arrival shows respect for both fellow students and faculty and it
enhances learning by reducing avoidable distractions.
• Students display their name cards. This permits fellow students and faculty to learn
names, enhancing opportunities for community building and evaluation of in-class
contributions.
• Students minimize unscheduled personal breaks. The learning environment improves
when disruptions are limited.
• Students are fully prepared for each class. You will learn most from this class if you work
and submit homework on time, keep up with the content introduced in each session, and
come prepared to class.
• Students respect the views and opinions of their colleagues. Disagreement and debate
are encouraged. Intolerance for the views of others is unacceptable.
• Laptops are closed and put away. When students are surfing the web, responding to e-
mail, instant messaging each other, and otherwise not devoting their full attention to the topic
at hand they are doing themselves and their peers a major disservice.
• Phones and wireless devices are turned off. When a need to communicate with someone
outside of class exists (e.g., for some medical need) please inform the professor prior to
class.
Your professionalism and activity in class contributes to your success in attracting the best faculty
and future students to this program.
Academic Dishonesty
Please keep in mind the McCombs Honor System.
Students with Disabilities
Upon request, the University of Texas at Austin provides appropriate academic accommodations
for qualified students with disabilities. Services for Students with Disabilities (SSD) is housed in
the Office of the Dean of Students, located on the fourth floor of the Student Services Building.
Information on how to register, downloadable forms, including guidelines for documentation,
accommodation request letters, and releases of information are available online at
http://deanofstudents.utexas.edu/ssd/index.php. Please do not hesitate to contact SSD at (512)
471-6259, VP: (512) 232-2937 or via e-mail if you have any questions.
Tentative Course Schedule
Date Topic Readings (text)
8/30 Introduction to the course. Introduction to data mining.
What is data mining? Why now?
Chapters 1 & 2
9/4 Fundamental concepts and definitions:
The data mining process
Data mining predictive and descriptive tasks
Supplement reading :
The KDD process for extracting useful knowledge from volumes of data. Usama Fayyad,
Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro, Padhraic Smyth. Communications of the ACM. Volume 39,
Issue 11 (November 1996). ACM Press New York, NY, USA
(http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/fayyad96kdd.html)
Competing on Analytics by Thomas Davenport. Don Cohen, and Al Jacobson. May 2005
(http://www.babsonknowledge.org/analytics.pdf)
Chapters 1 & 2
9/6 Classification: Recursive partitioning & Decision Trees
Ch 2 pp. 39-42
(revisit), Ch. 6 pp.
165-194, 209.
9/11 Classification: Recursive partitioning & Decision Trees
9/13 Finalize classification trees, inference with trees, inference with missing
values.
9/18 Model Evaluation : Classification accuracy rate, and cost sensitive
evaluation metrics
Ch. 3 pp. 43-54
9/20 Review for Quiz 1
9/22 Quiz 1 (Introduction and classification trees)
9/25 Model Evaluation and Decision Making
Ch. 3 pp. 43-54
9/27 Model Evaluation
Ch. 3 pp. 43-54
10/2 WEKA lab session
10/4 WEKA lab session
10/9 Quiz 2
10/11 Recommender Systems and KNN algorithm
Chapter 8: pp.257-
271
10/16 Recommender systems: Association rules, sequential patterns,
PageRank.
Pages 287-315,
Date Topic Readings
10/18 Recommender systems: Association rules, sequential patterns, PageRank.
Pages 287-
315
10/23 WEKA Lab Session: Basketball memorabilia investment case
10/25 Quiz 3: Recommender Systems: Content-based recommendations and collaborative
filtering
10/30 Decision making using data-driven business intelligence
Evaluating decision making strategies
11/6 WEKA Lab Session: Basketball memorabilia investment case
11/8 Clustering/segmentation analysis
<Intermediate report on term project is due in the beginning of class>
Chapter 11
11/13 WEKA Lab Session: Clustering NBA players
11/15 Quiz 4 : Item-to-item vs. person-to-person recommender systems, network-based
recommendations (Page-rank), clustering, and lessons from the Basketball memorabilia
investment case.
11/20 Text mining and information retrieval: Bayesian learning with applications to spam filtering:
conditional probability, Bayes rule, Naïve Bayes classifier
Ch. 8 pp.
257-271
Additional
readings
on BB
11/22
Thanksgiving Day
11/27
Text mining (continued)
11/29 Optional Make-up Quiz
12/4 Term project report is due in class
Team projects - presentations and discussion
12/6 Feedback on team members’ contributions is due
Team projects - presentations and discussion
doc_262073405.pdf