Chicago Booth’s MBA concentration in business analytics prepares you to understand datasets and models, then leverage those insights to make informed decisions for your business.
In our interdisciplinary curriculum, you’ll hone your analytical aptitude with courses in big data, predictive analysis, statistics, decision optimization, and the major programming languages.
Wide-ranging elective courses in statistics, marketing, operations, and business analytics teach you to apply analytics to real-world business problems and prepare you for high-demand careers in finance, professional services, information technology, and beyond. At Booth, we also offer you courses in this space that you won’t find at other top business schools, including Health-Care Data Analytics and the Health-Care Analytics Laboratory.
To complete a concentration in business analytics, you’ll choose five courses in the discipline. Here are just a few of the options.
This course teaches you frameworks for how to formulate managerial decision models that represent real-world problems in a wide range of business areas including operations, marketing, finance, and strategy. You will learn how to analyze and ultimately solve such decision models and to understand the managerial interpretations of your model solution. The skills you learn in this course will greatly enhance your analytical problem-solving capabilities.
This course centers on the analysis, exploration, and simplification of large high-dimensional datasets. You will learn how to model and interpret complicated big data and become adept at building powerful models for prediction and classification. Techniques covered include an advanced overview of linear and logistic regression, model choice and false discovery rates, multinomial and binary regression, classification, decision trees, factor models, clustering, the bootstrap, and cross-validation.
In this course, you will focus on techniques emphasizing how machine learning can be used to create value and provide insights from data in the context of business applications. You will focus on predictive analytics: decision trees, nearest neighbor classifiers, boosting, random forests, deep neural networks, naive Bayes, and support vector machines. You will also learn about unsupervised techniques for extracting actionable patterns from data, such as clustering, collaborative filtering, probabilistic graphical modeling and dimension reduction with applications to customer segmentation, recommender systems, graph and time series mining, and anomaly detection.
There are many excellent courses that teach you the mechanics behind artificial intelligence. In this course, you will take a different approach by deploying these tools to foster understanding of what these tools do well and what they do badly. You will develop a functional, rather than mechanistic, understanding. You’ll become an expert at identifying ideal use-cases and be well placed to create new products, businesses, and policies that use artificial intelligence.
Marketing decisions in the era of big data are increasingly based on a statistical analysis of large amounts of transaction and customer data that provides the basis for profitability and ROI predictions. The goal of this class is to introduce modern data-driven marketing techniques and train you as a data scientist who can analyze data and make marketing decisions using some of the state-of-the-art tools that are employed in the industry. You will be exposed to a wide range of topics, including demand modeling, the analysis of household-level data, customer relationship management (CRM) and database marketing, and elements of digital marketing. The focus throughout is on predicting the impact of marketing decisions, including pricing, advertising, and customer targeting, on customer profitability and the return on investment (ROI) from a customer interaction.
To see more business analytics courses, visit our course catalog and search by concentration area for your program of interest.
Our business analytics faculty members make pathbreaking discoveries in everything from data mining and machine learning to the delivery of health-care services and the mathematical modeling of systems under uncertainty.
The research insights of our business analytics faculty appear regularly in publications, including Chicago Booth Review.
Television advertising may be considerably less effective than published studies suggest, according to Chicago Booth’s Bradley Shapiro and Günter J. Hitsch and Northwestern’s Anna E. Tuchman.
Why the Power of TV Advertising has been Overstated
Chicago Booth’s Dan Adelman has devised a new model for rating and ranking hospital performance that draws on a well-known concept from portfolio management.
A Problem with Hospital Ratings—and How to Fix It
Research from Chicago Booth’s Max Farrell, Tengyuan Liang, and Sanjog Misra seeks to quantify the uncertainty inherent in machine-learning predictions.
How (in)accurate is Machine Learning?
Faculty members at Booth are connected to some of the most important leaders across industry. Our faculty regularly invite these leading practitioners and influencers to speak to students in the Booth classroom, providing you with greater access to learn, network, and grow.
Learn from Industry ExpertsDevelop your skills, meet new people, and build a dynamic network. As an MBA student in business analytics at Booth, you’ll have many opportunities to get involved in student groups, competitions, and other activities.
Test your theories and gain valuable experience in some of the world’s most prestigious competitions on campus and around the globe.
Participate in a Competition
Get involved, develop new skills, and meet new people in a wide array of student-led groups.
Join a Full-Time MBA Group
Pursue your interests and expand your network by joining a student-led group for Part-Time MBA students.
Explore Part-Time MBA Student GroupsBooth Hacks hosts an eight-week program of specialized classes and other exciting events to teach Booth students the basics of coding. All Booth students are welcome to join, with no prior experience required. Booth Hacks’s mission is to encourage students to find new, innovative, and unusual solutions to problems through the fundamentals of computer programming with a focus on business-related web development.
