Outline

Overview

Advances in information technology have made available rich information data sets, often generated automatically as a by-product of the main institutional activity of a firm or business unit. Data Mining deals with inferring and validating patterns, structures and relationships in data, as a tool to support decisions in the business environment. This unit offers an insight into the main statistical methodologies for the visualisation and the analysis of business and market data, providing the information requirements for specific tasks such as credit scoring, prediction and classification, market segmentation and product positioning. Emphasis is given to empirical applications using modern software tools.

Unit details and rules

Unit code	QBUS3820
Academic unit	Business Analytics
Credit points	6
Prohibitions ?	None
Prerequisites ?	QBUS2820
Corequisites ?	None
Assumed knowledge ?	None
Available to study abroad and exchange students	Yes

Teaching staff

Coordinator	Marcel Scharth, marcel.scharth@sydney.edu.au

Type	Description	Weight	Due	Length
Final exam (Take-home extended release)	Final exam Take-home exam	45%	Formal exam period	48 hours
Outcomes assessed:
In-semester test (Record+)	Mid-semester exam Online exam	25%	Week 08 Due date: 13 Apr 2022 at 17:00	2 hours
Outcomes assessed:
Assignment	Group project Machine learning project	30%	Week 13 Due date: 27 May 2022 at 23:59	20 pages
Outcomes assessed:
= group assignment ? = Type B in-semester exam ? = Type E final exam ?

Assessment summary

Group project: In this assessment students will simulate a real work experience as a professional analytics team. The assignment will measure your knowledge of machine learning methods, your skill in applying and evaluating these methods using Python, and your ability to communicate the results and conclusions in a professional way.
Mid-semester exam: This exam will cover all the material up to the date of the exam.
Final exam: This will assess all aspects of this unit. The questions will test students' ability to provide a complete description of the essential characteristics of the methods covered, to make informed comparisons of the methods, to correctly interpret and analyse statistical results, and to formulate substantive conclusions based on these results. The questions will also cover theoretical aspects of the material.

You can find detailed information about each assessment on Canvas.

Assessment criteria

The University awards common result grades, set out in the Coursework Policy 2014 (Schedule 1).

As a general guide, a high distinction indicates work of an exceptional standard, a distinction a very high standard, a credit a good standard, and a pass an acceptable standard.

Result name	Mark range	Description
High distinction	85 - 100	Awarded when you demonstrate the learning outcomes for the unit at an exceptional standard, as defined by grade descriptors or exemplars outlined by your faculty or school.
Distinction	75 - 84	Awarded when you demonstrate the learning outcomes for the unit at a very high standard, as defined by grade descriptors or exemplars outlined by your faculty or school.
Credit	65 - 74	Awarded when you demonstrate the learning outcomes for the unit at a good standard, as defined by grade descriptors or exemplars outlined by your faculty or school.
Pass	50 - 64	Awarded when you demonstrate the learning outcomes for the unit at an acceptable standard, as defined by grade descriptors or exemplars outlined by your faculty or school.
Fail	0 - 49	When you don’t meet the learning outcomes of the unit to a satisfactory standard.

For more information see sydney.edu.au/students/guide-to-grades.

For more information see guide to grades.

Late submission

In accordance with University policy, these penalties apply when written work is submitted after 11:59pm on the due date:

Deduction of 5% of the maximum mark for each calendar day after the due date.
After ten calendar days late, a mark of zero will be awarded.

This unit has an exception to the standard University policy or supplementary information has been provided by the unit coordinator. This information is displayed below:

Late submission is not possible for certain aspects of the assignment. A mark of zero will apply to the corresponding part of the assessment.

Academic integrity

The Current Student website provides information on academic integrity and the resources available to all students. The University expects students and staff to act ethically and honestly and will treat all allegations of academic integrity breaches seriously.

We use similarity detection software to detect potential instances of plagiarism or other forms of academic integrity breach. If such matches indicate evidence of plagiarism or other forms of academic integrity breaches, your teacher is required to report your work for further investigation.

You may only use artificial intelligence and writing assistance tools in assessment tasks if you are permitted to by your unit coordinator, and if you do use them, you must also acknowledge this in your work, either in a footnote or an acknowledgement section.

Studiosity is permitted for postgraduate units unless otherwise indicated by the unit coordinator. The use of this service must be acknowledged in your submission.

Learning support

Simple extensions

If you encounter a problem submitting your work on time, you may be able to apply for an extension of five calendar days through a simple extension.  The application process will be different depending on the type of assessment and extensions cannot be granted for some assessment types like exams.

Special consideration

If exceptional circumstances mean you can’t complete an assessment, you need consideration for a longer period of time, or if you have essential commitments which impact your performance in an assessment, you may be eligible for special consideration or special arrangements.

Special consideration applications will not be affected by a simple extension application.

Using AI responsibly

Co-created with students, AI in Education includes lots of helpful examples of how students use generative AI tools to support their learning. It explains how generative AI works, the different tools available and how to use them responsibly and productively.

Weekly schedule

WK	Topic	Learning activity
Week 01	Introduction to Machine Learning	Lecture (2 hr)
Week 01	Background Knowledge for Machine Learning	Tutorial (1 hr)
Week 02	Machine Learning Fundamentals	Lecture (2 hr)
Week 02	Machine Learning Exploration	Tutorial (1 hr)
Week 03	Feature Engineering	Lecture (2 hr)
Week 03	Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn	Tutorial (1 hr)
Week 04	Practical Methodology (model selection, hyperparameter optimisation, feature selection, model stacking and interpretability).	Lecture (2 hr)
Week 04	Feature engineering	Tutorial (1 hr)
Week 05	Training Machine Learning Models (Part 1)	Lecture (2 hr)
Week 05	Practical Methodology	Tutorial (1 hr)
Week 06	Training Machine Learning Models (Part 2)	Lecture (2 hr)
Week 06	Maximum Likelihood	Tutorial (1 hr)
Week 07	Nonlinear Modelling	Lecture (2 hr)
Week 07	Algorithms for Optimisation	Tutorial (1 hr)
Week 08	Tree-Based Methods (Part 1)	Lecture (2 hr)
Week 08	Generalised Additive Models	Tutorial (1 hr)
Week 09	Tree-Based Methods (Part 2)	Lecture (2 hr)
Week 09	Decision Trees	Tutorial (1 hr)
Week 10	Gradient Boosting	Lecture (2 hr)
Week 10	Random Forests and Boosting	Tutorial (1 hr)
Week 11	Deep Learning (Part 1)	Lecture (2 hr)
Week 11	Gradient Boosting with LightGBM, XGBoost and CatBoost	Tutorial (1 hr)
Week 12	Deep Learning (Part 2)	Lecture (2 hr)
Week 12	Deep Learning with PyTorch (Part 1)	Tutorial (1 hr)
Week 13	Deep Learning (Part 3)	Lecture (2 hr)
Week 13	Deep Learning with PyTorch (Part 2)	Tutorial (1 hr)

Study commitment

Typically, there is a minimum expectation of 1.5-2 hours of student effort per week per credit point for units of study offered over a full semester. For a 6 credit point unit, this equates to roughly 120-150 hours of student effort in total.

Required readings

All readings for this unit can be accessed through Canvas.

Textbook

James, G., Witten, D., Hastie, T. and Tibshirani, R. (2021). An Introduction to Statistical Learning (Second Edition). New York: Springer.

Additional reading

Domingos, P. (2012). A Few Useful Things to Know about Machine Learning. Communications of the ACM, 55(10), 78-87.

Advanced textbook

Students with sufficient background in statistics can consider progressing to more advanced reading.

Friedman, J., Hastie, T. and Tibshirani, R. (2009). The Elements of Statistical Learning. Second Edition. Springer, Berlin: Springer Series in Statistics.

Learning outcomes

Learning outcomes are what students know, understand and are able to do on completion of a unit of study. They are aligned with the University's graduate qualities and are assessed as part of the curriculum.

Outcomes
Graduate qualities

At the completion of this unit, you should be able to:

LO1. demonstrate the knowledge of statistical theory required for business data mining and data analysis
LO2. identify which statistical tool is most relevant for specific business analytics tasks
LO3. identify the advantages and limitations of each method
LO4. extract information from large volumes of data readily available from the business environment
LO5. obtain and interpret a meaningful analytical result using a software package such as Python
LO6. work productively in a team
LO7. present and write about their findings effectively.

Graduate qualities

The graduate qualities are the qualities and skills that all University of Sydney graduates must demonstrate on successful completion of an award course. As a future Sydney graduate, the set of qualities have been designed to equip you for the contemporary world.

GQ1	Depth of disciplinary expertise Deep disciplinary expertise is the ability to integrate and rigorously apply knowledge, understanding and skills of a recognised discipline defined by scholarly activity, as well as familiarity with evolving practice of the discipline.
GQ2	Critical thinking and problem solving Critical thinking and problem solving are the questioning of ideas, evidence and assumptions in order to propose and evaluate hypotheses or alternative arguments before formulating a conclusion or a solution to an identified problem.
GQ3	Oral and written communication Effective communication, in both oral and written form, is the clear exchange of meaning in a manner that is appropriate to audience and context.
GQ4	Information and digital literacy Information and digital literacy is the ability to locate, interpret, evaluate, manage, adapt, integrate, create and convey information using appropriate resources, tools and strategies.
GQ5	Inventiveness Generating novel ideas and solutions.
GQ6	Cultural competence Cultural Competence is the ability to actively, ethically, respectfully, and successfully engage across and between cultures. In the Australian context, this includes and celebrates Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures, knowledge systems, and a mature understanding of contemporary issues.
GQ7	Interdisciplinary effectiveness Interdisciplinary effectiveness is the integration and synthesis of multiple viewpoints and practices, working effectively across disciplinary boundaries.
GQ8	Integrated professional, ethical, and personal identity An integrated professional, ethical and personal identity is understanding the interaction between one’s personal and professional selves in an ethical context.
GQ9	Influence Engaging others in a process, idea or vision.

Outcome map

Learning outcomes	Graduate qualities
Learning outcomes

Responding to student feedback

This section outlines changes made to this unit following staff and student reviews.

No changes have been made since this unit was last offered.

Additional information

Python

Python is a free and open-source general-purpose programming language that will allow us to bring the content of the unit into practice. Currently, Python is the most widely used language for machine learning and data science. It has powerful data manipulation, statistics, machine learning, data visualisation, and scientific libraries. Python is simple to learn and use and is supported by a large community of users in industry and academia.

You can find more information on Canvas.

Jupyter

The tutorials will make extensive use of Jupyter notebooks. A Jupyter Notebook is a web-based interactive document that combines live code, text and figures.

We recommend JupyterLab as an integrated development environment for working with Jupyter notebooks.

Cloud computing

Some tools used in this unit of study can have high computational requirements that exceed the capabilities of your current device. You should be ready to use a cloud environment such as Google Colab (free service) to run computationally intensive code as necessary. See Canvas for more options.

Learning activities

You will be asked to study additional material beyond the lectures and tutorials.

Practice

It is fundamental that you engage with the material by working on problems and developing your own projects and solutions.

Disclaimer

The University reserves the right to amend units of study or no longer offer certain units, including where there are low enrolment numbers.

To help you understand common terms that we use at the University, we offer an online glossary.

Current students

Overview

Overview

Unit details and rules

Teaching staff

Assessment

Assessment

Assessment summary

Assessment criteria

Late submission

Academic integrity

Learning support

Learning support

Simple extensions

Special consideration

Using AI responsibly

Weekly schedule

Weekly schedule

Study commitment

Required readings

Learning outcomes

Learning outcomes

Graduate qualities

Outcome map

Responding to student feedback

Responding to student feedback

Additional information

Additional information

Disclaimer

On this page

Useful links

Media

Student links

About us

Connect

Current students

QBUS3820: Machine Learning and Data Mining in Business

Semester 1, 2022 [Normal day] - Remote

Overview

Overview

Unit details and rules

Teaching staff

Assessment

Assessment

Assessment summary

Assessment criteria

Late submission

Academic integrity

Learning support

Learning support

Simple extensions

Special consideration

Using AI responsibly

Weekly schedule

Weekly schedule

Study commitment

Required readings

Learning outcomes

Learning outcomes

Graduate qualities

Outcome map

Responding to student feedback

Responding to student feedback

Additional information

Additional information

Disclaimer

On this page

Useful links

Media

Student links

About us

Connect