Online Course – Certified Professional Internship in Business Statistics and Analytics from Rice University

Improve your business analytics skills with professional development courses. Learn to apply statistical and data analysis tools to a variety of business applications.

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Professional Certificate

Beginners

No prior knowledge required

Time to complete the course

7-day free trial

No unnecessary risks

Skills you will acquire in the course

  • Mastering basic spreadsheet functions
  • Building theoretical metrics for business data
  • Developing data modeling capabilities
  • Learning basic probability concepts
  • Measuring and modeling uncertainty
  • Analyzing and guiding business decisions using a linear regression model

What you will learn in the course

Courses for which the course is suitable

  • Data Analyst
  • Business Analyst
  • Data Scientist
  • Strategic planner
  • Project Manager
  • Business consultant
  • Statistical Modeler
  • Data analysis specialist
  • Information Systems Manager
  • Data Science Researcher

Internship – Series of 5 courses

The Statistics and Business Analytics specialization is designed to give you a fundamental understanding of business data analysis tools and techniques. Drawing on content from our Data Science Master’s and PhD programs, you will learn how to:

  • Master basic spreadsheet functions
  • Build theoretical metrics for business data
  • Develop your data modeling skills
  • Learn about basic probability concepts
  • Measure and model uncertainty
  • Analyze and guide business decisions using a linear regression model

The internship will end with a final project in which you will apply the skills and knowledge you have acquired to a real business problem.

To be successful in all assignments, students must have access to a Windows version of Microsoft Excel 2010 or later.

To see a video overview of this internship, click here!

Details of the courses that make up the specialization

For data analysis using Excel

Course 1: Introduction to Excel

Duration: 24 hours
Rating: 4.7 (10,252 ratings)

What you’ll learn

Excel is widely used in industry. It is a powerful tool for data analysis. The course is designed for two types of learners: those with very basic knowledge of Excel and those who use it regularly at a superficial level.

Week 1: Introduction to Spreadsheets

  • Reading data into Excel
  • Basic functions in Excel
  • Row and column formatting
  • Using formulas in Excel

Week 2: Spreadsheet functions for organizing data

  • IF and nested IF functions
  • VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP
  • RANDBETWEEN function

Week 3: Introduction to filtering, pivot tables, and graphs

  • Filtering data in Excel
  • Using pivot tables
  • Introduction to Excel’s graphical capabilities

Week 4: Advanced Graphs and Charts

  • Line, column, and pie charts
  • Scatter graphs and histograms

Course 2: Basic Data Properties

Duration: 20 hours
Rating: 4.7 (2,545 ratings)

What you’ll learn

The course offers an in-depth understanding of business statistics, including descriptive and probability measures.

Week 1: Basic properties of data

  • Indicators of major trends
  • Measures of dispersion in data
  • Box plots

Week 2: Descriptive measures of association, probability, and statistical distributions

  • Relationship and probability measures
  • Introduction to statistical distributions

Week 3: The Normal Distribution

  • NORM.DIST, NORM.INV functions in Excel

Week 4: Working with distributions

  • Applications of the normal distribution
  • Binomial and Poisson distributions

Course 3: Business Applications of Hypothesis Testing

Duration: 24 hours
Rating: 4.8 (1,307 ratings)

What you’ll learn

The course offers an understanding of confidence intervals and hypothesis testing.

Week 1: Safety margin – Introduction

  • Displaying the t distribution
  • Building safety ranges

Week 2: Safety Range – Applications

  • Business applications of the security range
  • Sample size calculation

Week 3: Hypothesis Testing

  • The logic of hypothesis testing
  • Type I and II errors

Week 4: Hypothesis Testing – Differences in Mean

  • Difference in Means Tests

Course 4: Linear Regression for Business Statistics

Duration: 27 hours
Rating: 4.8 (1,344 ratings)

What you’ll learn

The course introduces linear regression analysis.

Week 1: Regression Analysis: Introduction

  • Building a regression model
  • Errors, residuals, and R-square

Week 2: Regression Analysis: Hypothesis Testing

  • Hypothesis testing in linear regression

Week 3: Regression Analysis: Dummy Variables

  • Interpreting Regression Results with Dummy Variables

Week 4: Regression Analysis: Variance Expansion

  • Building confidence limits for predictions

Course 5: Final Project in Business Statistics and Analysis

Duration: 7 hours
Rating: 4.7 (429 ratings)

What you’ll learn

An opportunity to apply the skills developed in the four courses to real-life data.

Skills you will develop

  • Contractual analysis
  • Data Analytics
  • Microsoft Excel
  • Regression analysis