The MS Business Analytics Capstone Course

The Business Analytics capstone is the culminating experience of our Masters Program in Business Analytics. Students work in small groups, supervised by an experienced Faculty member, to provide data insights to client organizations. ​ Skills you can expect to have within the team: Python, R, SQL, Statistics, Advanced analytics models and algorithms.

Students will also have specialized knowledge in areas such as end-user software (e.g. SAS or SPSS Modeler); Natural Language Processing; or Econometrics (time series).

Finally, being in the Masters program, our students have domain knowledge based on their undergraduate education and prior work experience. Many of our students come from an Engineering or a Finance background. We also have several student athletes.

Generally, there are some core types of projects.

Analytics and Business Process

• Have a business process some data but not sure of role of analytics? The team can provide initial exploratory analysis to develop an approach that could have one of the above elements.

Predictive Modeling

• Prediction of a specific aspect of a business process.

Dashboarding

• Business visibility to key performance metrics.

Business Understanding

• Want to better understand a key aspect of a business process through analysis and visualization? Teams can generate business understanding.

Prototyping

• Developing an analytics product as a part of an existing product or services? The team can prototype.

Prior Examples

• These are some examples of projects from Spring 2019.

Company Name	Brief Description of Project (1-2 Sentences)
Mind Genomics	Automating creation of categories and bag of words for each category for Nissan dealerships using text analysis, scraping, SPSS Modeler etc.
Outmatch	Making improvement of the existing model to Outmatch to get a better prediction of the candidate’s performance. Our final goal is to select the proper combination of independent factors and modeling for better prediction.
ReceiptHQ	Our Capstone Team works with a Troy based startup- ReceiptHQ. Through the use of Microsoft’s PowerBi, a dashboard is created for ReceiptHQ to help restaurant owners understand performance, gain insights, and take action.
IBM CISL	This project is studying the engagement between angel groups and startups on twitter. We are aiming at offering visualizations of aggregated data from CrunchBase and Twitter to help angel groups in CISL boardroom select startups as their investment.
Financial Institution	The sales division has a subjective probability structure to understand the closing of new business deals, in the CRM system. Goal is to explore how effective the probability weightings are and the timings of the opportunities.
Auto/Mate	We are using the sales force data of Auto/Mate to uncover how various operational and marketing decisions influence the customers to complete the deal. Also, our analysis uncovers the reasons why customers move on to the competitors and potential bottlenecks stopping the deal from happening successfully.
Cortex	To provide a series of recommendations to Cortex regarding social media posts for the travel industry. These posts should recommend new areas (factors) that are not currently being used by the particular client. These recommendations should include, but are not limited to, colors used, post subjects, and objects.
New York State-Department of Health	We are analyzing how much people have to travel from one place to the other in order to health care access. The reasons behind the travel and the other hospitals that have been passed by while travelling are researched on.
CommerceHub	Develop a methodology and algorithms to aggregate similar products in CommerceHub’s order stream.
deFacto Global	Research and provide a robust implementation for new forecasting models into their current software.
Advantage Media Inc.	We were able to improve AMI’s visualization and report creation by leveraging MS Power BI. A predictive model was also developed to help give added insight on the costs of spot rates throughout the year.
PUBG MadGlory	The client, PUBG Madglory, produces a free-use API which allows community developers to access in-game player and match data. This project will provide critical educational literature and use cases for the PUBG API around data generation as well as opportunities to perform advanced modeling techniques on that player/match data.

Faculty

Jason Kuruzovich

Jason is an academic entrepreneur that works on problems in which analytics can have a meaningful impact on the world. Jason teaches the Business Analytics Capstone course, where over the past 3 years he has worked with students on over 20 company projects as part of the RPI MS Business Analytics program (ranked 3rd in the world by TFE Times). Through his role as Director of the Severino Center for Technological Entrepreneurship, Jason manages a wide variety of programs to encourage entrepreneurship through contexts, communities, and mentorship opportunities. Jason has been directly involved in the launch of numerous programs including Foundry-RPI, Startup Tech Valley meetup, NSF Funded NYS Capital Region I-Corp Site Program (PI for grant). He has been recognized as one of the Albany Business Review’s 40 under 40 in the Capital Region and received the Center for Economic Growth (CEG) Technology Innovation Award. He also received the 2016 Upstate Venture Connect Campus Connector Award. LinkedIn Twitter Email kuruzj@rpi.edu