Predictive Analytics For Business Nanodegree Notes and Review

NOTE: If you are looking forward to enrolling in Predictive Analytics for Business Nanodegree on Udacity or any other Nanodegree Program, you can click on this link to get $50 off.

It’s been a long time since I last wrote an article on my blog, approx. a couple of months. Where was I busy? What was I doing?

Well, I enrolled in Predictive Analytics for Business Nanodegree (Business Analyst Nanodegree), and I was spending about 7-8 hours every day on this course. Well, few of you might think it’s not that big course, but when you start making notes for every lecture, it does take some extra time.

Now coming on to the course, personally I loved this Nanodegree and, yeah I would like to recommend this course to everyone interested in becoming a Business Analyst, or anyone who is getting into Data Science (like me).

Here is the introduction video for the course:

Cost : $399 OR ₹19259/month + GST

There have been recent changes in the pricing plans for this course, earlier in Jan 2017, the cost for this Nanodegree was about $1999, which was then changed to $200/month, currently, it is $399/month and ₹19,259/month for Indian Students, but Udacity again revised the pricing plan, for Indian students, it is offered for ₹58,087 + GST(18%) tax, for a period of 3 months.

Time: 10hrs/week

It depends on person to person, how much time he/she can spend on the course. Udacity says that if one will spend 10hrs/week on this course, that student will be able to complete the course in 8-10 months. I completed this course in about 1.5 months because I spent 7-9 hours every day for this course and I also made handwritten notes which took about double the amount of time required to complete the course.

Prerequisites and Requirement for the Course:

A passion for using data to make better business decisions
Basic statistics and math knowledge
An Alteryx license (provided to Nanodegree students at no cost)
A Tableau license (provided to Nanodegree students at no cost)
No programming experience is required

Instructors:

Patrick Nussbaumer (Instructor from Alteryx and explains the concepts really well)
Maureen Wolfson (Maureen and Mat was my favorite)
Mat Leonard (As I said he was my favorite instructor for this course)
Ben Burkholder (A good instructor)
Tony Moses (Very Very Very fast instructor and if you are making notes you will want him to slow down)
Rod Light (Again a good instructor)

Projects:

There are total of 9 projects including P0 and Capstone Project. All the projects are awesome, the name of all the projects are:

P1: Predict Sales for a Catalog Launch
P2: Select the Location for a Pet Store
P3: Build Tableau Dashboards
P4: Predict Loan Default Risk
P5: Predict the Impact of a Menu Launch
P6: Forecast Video Game Demand
P7: Segment the Countries of the World
P8: Capstone

My Review:

As I already said above this course is awesome and recommended to everyone interested in getting into Data Science or becoming a Business Analyst. The course starts with the very basic concepts in Business Analysis, which is Analytical Problem Solving Framework (CRISP-DM) and explains every single step in the framework, and then moves on to Methodology map, which is the spine of Predictive Analytics for Business. It explains how a person should approach a Business Problem, which type of predictive models ranging from ETS, ARIMA, A/B Testing, Forest Model, Boosted Model, LR, DT should be used for different business problems.

The whole course is then based on this methodology map, and different types of Business problems ranging from Data-Rich, Data Poor, Numeric, Classification, Continuous, Time-Based, Binary, Non-Binary. The last Chapter has lectured on Non-Predictive Models like Segmentation and Clustering.

After completing this Nanodegree, one will master one of the best Predictive modeling tools, Alteryx, and one of the best Visualization tools, Tableau. Though Tableau doesn’t find a lot of use in the projects, P3 is completely based on Tableau, and in the capstone project we have to use Tableau for the visualization.

Udacity will be providing you with the license key for both these software’s, but if you are a student, you can get an extra 1-year license key for Tableau Desktop under student program, you can do so by either sharing your student e-mail id or your student ID card.

You will learn how to use different predictive models using Alteryx, how to compare them, which factors are to be considered when comparing 2 or more predictive models, how to choose the best predictive model and how to find the predictive outcome using that best predictive model.

Well, if someone wants to have a look at the certificate for this course, here is what I earned after working really hard for a couple of months:

You can find all the Visualization Task I did use Tableau in the course here, on my Tableau Public Profile.

Notes:

As I mentioned above I made notes as I completed my Nanodegree, though I was not able to complete the notes for P7, So I will be sharing notes for the 6 Chapters, that is till P6,(I have shared the notes for P7 as well, but they are not 100% complete) you can click on the link below to go directly to that page, where you can download and read the notes for free.
There have been some changes very recently for this course, a new chapter called SQL for Data Analysis has been added to the course which was not available few days back, So I will not be able to share notes for this chapter:

Alternate Courses for Business Analyst:

Yes, this is a costly course and cannot be afforded by everyone, so I searched the internet to find some other good courses at reasonable prices. There are various Udemy courses which can be done at mere $10-$20, if you do not find the courses mentioned below on Udemy to be of $10-$20, you can contact me, I can give you codes to get the course for a much cheaper price. Here are a few other good courses I came up with: