Business Intelligence (2013-2014)

Number of lectures: 6
Instructor: Dr. Emiel Caron
Contact info: e.a.m.caron@cwts.leidenuniv.nl
1. Course description
Many decisions in professional and private life are taken on the basis of data that come from all
sorts of information systems. Business Intelligence (BI) is about the developments in the way we
can use data stored in those information systems to generate new and useful information that can
support executive managers in taking business decisions. BI is an umbrella term that combines
the processes, technologies, and tools needed to transform data into information, information into
knowledge, and knowledge into plans that drive profitable business action. BI encompasses: data
warehousing, OnLine Analytical Processing (OLAP), business analytical tools, data mining,
business performance and knowledge management.
The commercial interest in BI is growing due to the increasing awareness of companies that the
vast amounts of data collected on customers and their behaviour contain valuable business
knowledge. Different types of knowledge can be derived from data warehouses, like rules
characterizing potential customer classes, knowledge classifying groups with larger risks, and so
on. Quite often useful causal relations are hidden in company databases and the goal of the
BI/data mining process is to induce these from the data and to represent them in meaningful ways
to improve business processes, typical business cases are: cross-selling, churn in mobile
communications, and risk analysis in financial services. The emphasis in this course will be on
the methodological and practical aspects of BI.
2. Learning objectives
In this course the student is given an introduction in decision support systems and intelligent
systems within the framework of BI. After this course the student has basic knowledge of

why computer support is needed for certain business decisions;

the principles of knowledge management en knowledge-based systems;
the construction of a data warehouse;
the business implications of a data warehouse;
OLAP database technology and reporting;
the fundamental issues of knowledge discovery in databases, i.e. data mining, such as
learning algorithms for classification, prediction and risk analysis;
the data mining process;
a key data mining model: decision trees and/or neural networks;
performance issues, interpretation, and the business relevance of data mining models.

In addition, the skill objective for the course is to give the student some hands on experience with
business intelligence software. By working with the software (at home) the student

has to develop a basic knowledge-based system (software Exsys Corvid);

has to analyse a simple data set with a data mining tool (software WEKA or R).