The University of Texas at Dallas

School of Management
MIS 6324 Introduction to Business Intelligence and Techniques
Spring 2011 Syllabus
Instructor Cuneyd Kaya, PhD (please pronounce my first name as “June - aid”)
E-mail cckaya@utdallas.edu (Best way to contact me)
DO NOT use E-Learning for sending me an e-mail.
Phone (972) 683-8780 (Work)
Class Times & Room 7:00PM-9:45PM on Fridays in SOM 2.106
Office Hours By Appointment only. I do not have an office on campus.
Course Website http://elearning.utdallas.edu/

Other For general class policies please refer to

http://coursebook.utdallas.edu/syllabus-policies/

Pre-requisites

MIS 6326 Database Management Systems. Any probability and statistics knowledge are also helpful.

Recommended Books

1. Michael Berry and Gordon Linoff, Data Mining Techniques: For Marketing, Sales, and Customer
Relationship Management, 2nd Edition, ISBN-10: 0471470643, ISBN-13: 978-0471470649
2. Galit Shmueli, Nitin Patel and Peter Bruce, Data Mining for Business Intelligence: Concepts, techniques,
and applications in Microsoft Office Excel with XLMiner, ISBN-10: 0470084855, ISBN-13: 978-
0470084854

Course Outline and Learning Objectives

As a result of many new technology implementations, many organizations have become rich in data, but poor in
information due to the lack of capabilities to extract information from their vast collection of data. Recently the
businesses who analyze their data better have thrived and become successful in their respective industries.
While brick-and-mortar retailers have the capability to capture every transaction at every store through hand-
held scanners and electronic cash registers while their counterparts in the online world can track each page the
users visit on their site and track each mouse click they performed regardless of whether the customer makes a
purchase or not. In this course, we will explore the techniques to extract valuable, relevant and actionable
information from this vast amount of data. We will focus on various techniques and learn which one to use for
which situation. You will also get introduced to various BI/DM tools as time permits.

The objectives in this course are as follows:

• To gain a general understanding of business intelligence / data mining, and to appreciate the data rich
environment of today’s global economy.
• To gain a practical understanding of many key methods integral to data mining.
• To gain an understanding of when to use which technique.
• To become aware of some current trends in the use of BI.
• To gain the intellectual capital required to provide business analytics services.

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Groups and Group Projects

About five to seven students will form a group to complete group projects. There is going to be 3 (three) group
assignments to be completed by each group over the semester. One hard copy submission from each group is
required.

Software

We will mainly use SAS Enterprise Miner and XLMiner software packages as long as they are available. The
instructions to get these packages will be provided to you during the class in later weeks.

Term Project

Each group will submit a term project report at the end of the semester. The purpose of the report is to identify
potential areas of application for the techniques covered in class. Students who are already working in the
industry should ideally come up with a project which would be beneficial at their company. Other students
should come up with a relevant topic and conduct a deep research/analysis on the topic. Each report should
refer to a minimum of 5 (five) scholarly articles and other industry publications (Wikipedia is NOT an
appropriate research source). UTD Library has the tools available to you to search and find plenty of references
and citations for your term project. Selected teams will be asked to present their work in class on 22 April and 29
April. The project report should be in 12-point font, double spaced and between 10-12 pages in length.

Written Exams

There will be two closed-book in-class written exams. If you have to miss an exam due to work or medical
conditions (for you or your immediate family members) please make prior arrangements with the professor. All
other Make-up exam requests will be rejected due to the logistics.

Participation

Every week, I will post articles on E-learning to be discussed in class. A voluntary group will be responsible for
leading the discussion. Participation in these discussions is strongly encouraged.

Announcements

Each student is responsible for checking the E-learning website at http://elearning.utdallas.edu to follow any
announcements.

Grade Components

Group Projects
(@15% Each) 45%
Term Project 20%
Midterm Exam 15%
Final Exam 15%
Participation 5%
TOTAL 100%

Your letter grade will be calculated based on your relevant rank to other students.

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Tentative Schedule

The following schedule may change due to the progress in class.

Week Topics Notes/Due Dates

1 14-Jan Class overview
2 21-Jan Introduction to Data Mining and Business Intelligence
3 28-Jan DM Process, Association Rules
4 4-Feb Segmentation
5 11-Feb Clustering
6 18-Feb Classification Project 1 Due
7 25-Feb Classification
8 4-Mar Genetic Algorithms
9 11-Mar MIDTERM EXAM Project 2 Due
10 18-Mar ---SPRING BREAK (NO CLASS)---
11 25-Mar KNN and Collaborative Filtering Term Project Proposal
12 1-Apr eb Mining
13 8-Apr CRM Project 3 Due
14 15-Apr Personalization and Recommender Systems
15 22-Apr Other BI/DM Tools, Term Paper Presentations Term Project Due
16 29-Apr Term Paper Presentations
17 6-May FINAL EXAM

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