Idaho State University · College of Business

BA 3316

Introduction to Data Analytics

Abigail Cormier · Fall 2026 · In-person

Last updated August 31, 2026

This course prepares you to turn raw data into insight about the world around you. You will do that by owning every step of the data value chain: acquiring data, transforming it into something you can work with, analyzing it, and communicating what you found to people who need to act on it.

Acquire Transform Analyze Communicate

Course outcomes

Through active engagement and successful completion of assignments in this course, you will gain the knowledge and skills to:

  1. acquire and prepare data for analysis.
  2. design reproducible data analyses.
  3. map business problems and policy questions to hypotheses about relationships in data.
  4. describe data and perform basic descriptive analysis.
  5. implement and interpret basic causal-inference research designs.
  6. implement and interpret basic machine-learning algorithms.
  7. communicate the results from descriptive, causal and predictive analyses.

Course topics

Part I: Transformation to Analysis

  1. Data fundamentals
  2. Beginning to learn
  3. Models for exploration
  4. Making inferences
  5. Measurement error, sample selection, and confounding
  6. Bayesian approach to learning from data

Part II: Explaining and Predicting

  1. Regression fundamentals
  2. Potential outcomes and causal inference
  3. Regression discontinuity
  4. Difference in differences
  5. Prediction with regression
  6. Introduction to machine learning