BA 3051 provides a toolset for analyzing data

By Justin Erickson, '24 BSB

The students watch intently as Professor Ibrahim Keita writes on the whiteboard. The topic of today's class? A/B Testing, and how businesses use it to choose between two versions of a product to find out which version performs better. In BA 3051: Data-Driven Business Decisions, students learn to analyze and make decisions based on data.

BA 3051 is a part of the core curriculum of the Carlson School. The course builds on lessons students learned in its prerequisites: BA 2551: Business Statistics in R and BA 2051: Modeling Business Scenarios in Excel. Data-Driven Business Decisions utilizes both Excel and R programming to apply statistical techniques and make business recommendations.

“Do you see a business being successful today without analyzing data? They can’t,” said Keita. “Today is all about data, which is why this course is so important. We want students to be familiar with data and to know what real problems businesses solve with data.”

Throughout the course, students learn four major topics: data visualization, A/B testing, regression analysis and predictive forecasting, and optimization. Students spend significant time on data visualization, which helps businesses communicate their data and find key insights.

“Learning to make and customize graphs based on data is something I found useful and will apply in the future,” said Keira Hoida, ‘26 BSB.

Optimization is another major topic in BA 3051. Students examine real business scenarios to determine the most efficient business choices. For example, students might evaluate the optimal strategy for moving products from a warehouse to an outlet store.

“It was very interesting to see how optimization works,” said Mahibah Rehan, ‘26 BSB. “I found it was much easier in Excel than R, so it was great to see the difference between them.”

By using R, students are introduced to coding, and how businesses use programming every day.

“We want students to understand programming and to be able to accomplish small assignments with programming,” said Keita. “By learning methods in both Excel and R, students will better remember the skills they learn in this course.”

Students can work together for most assignments in the course. This allows them to problem-solve together and to tackle bigger business scenarios.

“Collaborating on more challenging problems was super beneficial,” said Hoida. “Digesting the lessons with a group and applying them to real-world issues will definitely be something I bring with me into my career.”

Preparing students for their careers is a primary goal of BA 3051. Everything they learn is hands-on and practical, so that when they graduate they will have the skill sets needed to find employment and succeed in their careers.

“This course was one of the reasons I got hired for my internship,” said Rehan. “My interviewers were struck that I was learning Excel and coding and how to apply those skills to real-world business decisions.”

“Data and business analytics have become such a hot topic,” said Alex Olenius, ‘26 BSB. “Getting familiar with Excel and R, being able to reference that on a resume, and being able to show that I know what I’m doing will benefit my future.”