Business Analytics Communicating with Numbers

Business Analytics: Communicating with Numbers was written from the ground up to prepare students to understand, manage, and visualize data, apply the appropriate tools, and communicate findings and their relevance. Unlike other resources that simply repackage statistics and traditional operations research, Jaggia seamlessly threads the topics of data wrangling, descriptive analytics, predictive analytics, and prescriptive analytics into a cohesive whole. Jaggia's 2nd edition was revised based on reviewer feedback to meet the current needs of instructors. This edition has five new chapters and new subsections, like data privacy and data ethics in Chapter 1, and has a stronger focus on Excel and R. A new chapter has been added on spreadsheet modeling and prescriptive analytics is covered across three chapters instead of one for more comprehensive coverage. Holistic analytics processes are emphasized, including dealing with real-life data that is neither "clean" nor "small". For example, a Big Data set of COVID-19 data is presented with a sample of over one million observations that include symptoms, patient demographics, and testing results. Similarly, the importance of storytelling is stressed throughout, to help students develop skills in articulating the business value of analytics by communicating key insights from a nontechnical standpoint. --