Introducing Prescriptive and Predictive Analytics to MBA Students with Microsoft Excel
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Managers are increasingly being tasked with overseeing data-driven projects that incorporate prescriptive and predictive models. Furthermore, basic knowledge of the data analytics pipeline is a fundamental requirement in many modern organizations. Given the central importance of analytics in today’s business environment, there is a growing demand for educational pedagogies that give students the opportunity to learn the fundamentals while also familiarizing them with how such tools are applied. However, a tension exists between the introduction of real-world problems that students can analyze and extract insight from and the need for prerequisite knowledge of mathematical concepts and programming languages such as Python/R. As a consequence, this paper describes an application-focused course that uses Microsoft Excel and mathematical programming to introduce MBA students with nontechnical backgrounds to tools from both prescriptive and predictive analytics. While students’ gain proficiency in managing data and creating optimization and machine learning models, they are also exposed to broader business concepts. Teaching evaluations indicate that the course has helped students further develop their practical skills in Microsoft Excel, gain an appreciation of the real-world impact of data analytics, and has introduced them to a discipline they originally believed was best suited for more technically focused professionals. Supplemental Material: Supplemental materials are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/ited.2023.0286 .
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.100 | 0.048 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".