Carry out an analytics study on a problem of your choosing. This can be any suitable problem that you are familiar with from your work place or elsewhere. Hence, you will have better insights about the problem which should lead to a better result. The system should be one that is suitable for a predictive and/or prescriptive analytics study and you must decide the objective(s) of the project. That is, you should set out clear objective(s) and apply appropriate analytics techniques explained in the lectures as the main techniques to meet those objective(s). Choose your objective(s) carefully so that the project is feasible within the available timescale and you have access to the necessary data. You can use the same data that you use in the group project as long as it is suitable for predictive and/or prescriptive analytics. Please obtain permission, where appropriate, to collect data. You can also use any suitable secondary data. The data can be modified to preserve its confidentiality (e.g. adding noise, transformation). All identifiable attributes from confidential data must be removed from the submitted files (e.g. name, date of birth, address, any form of identification number).
Software
Use standard Ms Excel 2013 or 2016 and only standard add-ins that are shipped with Excel can be used for your analytics work. If in doubt, please check with me. The use of third-party library will be penalised heavily because it is not fair to other students.
Submission
Each student is required to hand in the following, which are best combined and submitted in a single zip file.
• A written report in MS Word document describing the project: The structure of the report is as follows:
1. Executive summary (maximum one page)
2. Describe the problem/system
3. Describe the data source, relevant information about the data, and any data cleaning/transformation that you have done
4. Explain your analytics work and the insights
5. Summarize your report by linking the insights to the proposed actions given in the executive summary
The maximum length of the report is 1,500 words including the executive summary. Write the executive summary for the decision makers (who are more interested in the making the right decisions) and the rest of the report to their analytics team (who are more interested in checking the validity of your analytics work).
• An Excel file containing your analytics work model (in XLSX format). A good mark will go to well-designed spreadsheet that can be readily presented to the decision makers. The spreadsheet should be well-written and easy-to-audit by the analytics team. Your spreadsheet must contain all data used for the analysis (not the raw data) and the detailed analysis so that we can verify your work.