The course will introduce prescriptive analytics techniques that are used in solving complex decision problems. The ideas that are presented in this course are motivated by today’s rise of big data analytics and the widespread of data driven decision making. Students will learn how to formulate decision making problems as mathematical models, how to source the data for these models, how to implement these models and solve them, and finally how to interpret the resulting solutions to gain business and managerial insights. The focus of the course will be on both the practical and the theoretical aspects of prescriptive analytics as well as on basic level computer programming that is needed for data manipulation and model development. Students will be able to gain basic programming skills and learn about prescriptive analytics models (formulation, theory, and implementation). Particularly the students will learn to:
- Develop an appropriate mathematical model for a business problem.
- Solve the models with suitable data.
- Interpret the solution and derive managerial insights.
- Present the results in technical and non-technical terms to different stakeholders.