Syllabus: Data Analytics & Big Data

Course Basic Information:

Course duration: 20 weeks course / 800 hours

Course modality: Full time
Course days and times: Monday to Friday from 9 to 17hs.
Instructors: Ester Bernardó, ​LinkedIn
Dani Castejón, L
​ inkedIn
Course web page: www.ubiqum.com/courses/data-analytics
Languages: Online platform and content is in English
Mentors can speak English/Spanish/Catalan.
Location: Barcelona

Main learning concepts of our Data Analytics Course:

Module 1: Understanding Customers

Tools Key Points

Weka ● Preprocessing Data (Filters, Missing Values)
● Data Mining
Excel ● Decision Trees
● Classification / Regression Algorithms (J48/C5.0, M5P)
● Presentation Skills to non-technical Audience

Module 2: Predicting Profitability and Customer Preferences

Tools Key Points

Weka ● Normalization, Distance, Correlation
● Machine Learning
Excel ● Compare Items (k-NN/IBk)
R ● Predictive Revenue Model (k-NN, M5P…)
● Class Prediction Model (J48, k-NN)
Syllabus: Data Analytics & Big Data

● R ​(Caret, RWeka)

Module 3: Deep Analytics and Visualization

Tools Key Points

R ● R ​Visualitzation (ggplot2)
● R ​Data Processing (dplyr, tidyr)
Weka
● R ​Time Series and Forecast
● Indoor Locationing - Wifi Fingerprint (k-NN and others)
● R​ Machine Learning

Module 4: Big Data - Web Mining

Tools Key Points

Weka ● Web Mining
● AWS​ Elastic Map Reduce
AWS ● AWS​ CLI
● Sentiment analysis

Course Description:

This course is designed for students who have no previous knowledge of data
analytics but wish to acquire these skills in a short period of time. These students
will learn how to analyze large data sets and identify patterns that will improve
any company’s and organization decision-making process. After completing the
course, they will be able to:

- Capture, categorize, simplify, normalize and prepare data to be processed

- Work with and analyze large data sets
- Visually represent analysis’s conclusions to technical and non technical
audiences
- Use the most common algorithms, to make sense of large amounts of data,
which are applicable to most business and management problems.
- Learn R programing language.
Syllabus: Data Analytics & Big Data

At the end of the program, you will have a professional portfolio of projects
and real experience with data analysis that will give you the necessary confidence
to be successful as a Data Analyst.

Course Objectives:

Almost every company and organization collects data about their operations to
better understand how to make internal improvements. As the amount of data
collected increases, it is more difficult to analyze this data manually. There is a
growing tendency at bigger companies to automate the collection of large
quantities of data (Big Data) to discover behavior patterns and better understand
their internal processes.

The collection of data (Data Mining) has several applications, including reducing
the amount of time needed to make decisions and cutting error margins. Data
analytics’ prediction abilities can improve a company’s marketing, help understand
customer behavior, and prevent fraud. Therefore, Data Mining is applicable to
every department in any company.

Using an SCC (Story Centered Curriculum) methodology, you will be able to

complete tasks like a Data Analyst. You will use machine learning techniques to
analyze online sales and market studies to find purchase patterns and customer
preferences. Data analysis helps a sales department improve decisions, decide
which products to offer, and how to offer them.

Course Pre-requisites:

Those interested in Data Analytics should have some prior experience in (or be
willing to work with):

● Science (testing or formulating hypotheses)

● Statistics (working with numbers and statistical methodology) and
Syllabus: Data Analytics & Big Data

● Programming (use of algorithms).

This course is well suited to those with a degree in Social and natural Sciences,
Engineering or Mathematics.

Course Grading:

Grades will be determined from:

● attendance (40%)
● programming exercises and deliverables at the end of every task (40%)
● and final presentation (20%)

Evaluation scheme is subject to change with a prior notice. Attendance will be

checked regularly. Missing classes frequently will automatically drop student out
of class.

Per our methodology there will be no exams and no master lessons. The student
is committed to attend to class and work on their assigned tasks and deliver them
via our online platform according to the program schedule.

Course Details:

Module 1: Data Analytics: Understanding Customers

Week 1-3 In this course students will be working for Blackwell Electronics as
data analysts. The students' job is to use data mining and
machine-learning techniques to investigate the patterns in
Blackwell's sales data and provide insight into customer buying
trends and preferences. The inferences students draw from the
patterns in the data will help the business make data-driven
decisions about sales and marketing activities and understand the
Syllabus: Data Analytics & Big Data

relationship between customer demographics and purchasing

behavior.

Finally, students will present to management, explaining their

insights and suggestions for data mining process improvements.

Module 2: Data Analytics: Predicting Profitability and Customer Preferences

Week 4-6 Students will continue to work as data analysts at Blackwell

Electronics. Students' job is to extend Blackwell's application of data
mining methods to develop predictive models.

In this course, students will use both Weka and the R statistical
programming language augmented with machine learning packages
to predict which potential new products that the sales team is
considering adding to Blackwell's current product mix will be the
most profitable. Next, students will create a model to predict which
brand of computer products Blackwell customers prefer based on
customer demographics collected from a marketing survey. Finally,
students will present to management, explaining their insights and
suggestions for data mining process improvements.

Module 3: Big Data - Web Mining

Week 7-12 You will learn the algorithmic and organizational skills required to
scale data analysis to large server farms, computing clouds, and the
web, including an understanding of the design and implementation
differences between single-computer and cloud-scale programs,
analytics, and data processing. You will also gain a deep knowledge
of predictive data analysis, ranging from discovering patterns and
correlations in data to making predictions and estimating their
accuracy. As part of this process, you will master fundamentals of
Syllabus: Data Analytics & Big Data

scaling up data analysis to a large cloud computing platform where

you will become proficient in working with map-reduce-based
systems and leveraging the computing power of the cloud to prepare
very large data sets for deep analysis, as well as learn how to train
and apply modern machine learning algorithms to large processed
datasets. You will also learn how to identify the types of business
questions for which Big Data analyses can provide significant insights
in support of business decision-making.

These skills are applicable to every big data project and will enable
you to present yourself as a key asset in solving business problems
that require data analysis. After successfully completing this course,
you will be able to:

● Frame and organize business questions in ways that can be

answered through Big Data analysis and meet the information
needs of a project.
● Identify types of questions for which data analysis cannot
provide accurate information.
● Acquire, process, and analyze extremely large data sets using
data mining methods to discover patterns or do data
exploration.
● Install, run, and apply machine learning tools to different kinds
of data.
● Set up and run Elastic Map Reduce (EMR) instances for data
analysis.
● Formulate the machine learning process to answer
domain-specific problems.
● Interpret the results of data analysis and data mining to make
predictions and to establish the reliability of those predictions
Syllabus: Data Analytics & Big Data

● Communicate results to management and other non-technical

audiences.
● Provision and utilize AWS EC2 instances.
● Build predictive models using either Weka or R​.

Module 4: Deep Analytics and Visualization

Week 13-16 Increasingly, technology companies are applying data analytics

techniques to the masses of data generated by devices such as smart
phones, appliances, vehicles, electric meters, ​et cetera – the
“Internet of Things”.

The ability to deal with data of these types will prove to be a

high-demand skill for data analysts. In this course, students will be
working for an Internet of Things technology start-up that wants to
use Data Analytics to solve two difficult problems in the physical
world:

● Smart energy usage: Modeling patterns of energy usage by

time of day and day of the year in a typical residence whose
electrical system is monitored by multiple sub-meters.
● Indoor locationing: Determining a person’s physical position in
a multi-building indoor space using wifi fingerprinting.

Students will learn to use the R statistical programming language to

perform visualizations, then to generate descriptive statistics and
predictive models using time series regression techniques and
statistical classifiers. Finally, students will present the results to the
start-up’s management, explaining strengths and weaknesses of the
approaches that were implemented and making suggestions for
further improvement.
Syllabus: Data Analytics & Big Data

Designed by:

This program were designed in collaboration with Dr. Jaime Carbonell and Dr.
Ravi Starzl of Carnegie Mellon University.

Dr. Jaime Carbonell ​is the Director of the Language Technologies Institute and
Allen Newell Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where
he pioneered the PhD and MS degrees in Language Technologies. His current
research includes machine learning, computational proteomics, data mining
(primarily in healthcare and finance), text mining and machine translation. Dr.
Carbonell has served on multiple governmental advisory committees such as the
Human Genome Committee of the National Institutes of Health, the Oakridge
National Laboratories Scientific Advisory Board, the National Institute of
Standards and Technology Interactive Systems Scientific Advisory Board, and the
German National Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) Scientific Advisory Board. He has
published more than 300 papers and books, and supervised more than 45 PhD
dissertations. He received SB degrees in Physics and Mathematics from MIT, and
MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from Yale University.

Dr. Ravi Starzl ​is a Systems Scientist in the Language Technologies Institute at
Carnegie Mellon University. He is an expert in the computational analysis and
modeling of complex information-driven systems, with experience in such diverse
domains as biological systems, financial systems, and Internet topologies. Dr.
Starzl has extensive experience with the computational and mathematical
methods integral to the effective acquisition, management, and utilization of
extremely large amounts of information. Having led several massive data analysis
projects with data sets as large as 100+TB, Dr. Starzl is fluent in the methods of Big
Data analytics, and is an active researcher in the area of parallelization of machine
learning methods for Big Data. He received his doctoral degree in Language and
Information Technologies from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie
Syllabus: Data Analytics & Big Data

Mellon University in 2012. At In addition to his research at CMU, Dr. Starzl develops
and teaches classes on the topics of Big Data, biotechnology, and advanced
software development.He has also participated in the founding, growth, and sale
of several biotechnology and high-tech startups.

Programme methodology:

This programme is based on Story Centered Curriculum (SCC) methodology.

This involves advanced simulation techniques of real situations. There are no
theoretical classes or rote learning study sessions to pass exams. SCC puts you in a
motivating scenario based on a real professional situation in which you perform
the same tasks as actual professionals, using the same tools, meaning that you can
fit easily into a real work team when the time comes.

You will be working in a team, as is usually the case in the world of work. A
comprehensive range of supporting material and the help needed to complete the
tasks are available on-line. You will be supervised by a tutor, who is always
available to answer any questions or clear up any doubts, and who will assess your
performance and advise on the project "deliverables".

SCC is an educational methodology that enables us to offer a learning-by-doing

approach in all its complexity and scope. This methodology has been successfully
used for more than 10 years at the Pittsburgh and Mountain View, California
campuses of the Carnegie Mellon University in the USA, where many students have
completed programmes developed using this methodology.

Tutors:

At the start of the course you are assigned a tutor who is a professional expert.
The tutor will foster teamwork and promote discussion of issues, helping you find
Syllabus: Data Analytics & Big Data

solutions and resolve the difficulties of the project by drawing on your own
resources.

They will give you feedback on the “deliverables” for each project at every
stage, so that you can continually refine them, learning from your mistakes and
achieving the mastery needed for each task.