Application-Based Programming

This course is for students with basic computer skills, including some data manipulation fundamentals, who want to further their data manipulation and analysis skills using graphical user interface (GUI) based systems, such as SPSS or SAS/JMP. The course begins with data wrangling and preparation fundamentals, delving deeply into advanced data engineering, data table restructuring, and data file amalgamation features. Students learn to solve common data problems to create analysis-ready data files. The second part of the course focuses on descriptive, associative, and predictive functions used to accomplish common data analytic goals, such as classification or regression. Here, students gain working familiarity with how application-based programming tools can be used to carry out common business analyses, such as fitting and validation of predictive regression, decision tree models, using statistical or machine learning focused techniques. Lastly, students also learn how to use the point-and-click interface to create re-usable syntax.