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Objectives
Graduates will find employment as consultants or advanced data analysts, or as members of technical/analytics teams supporting the decision making of middle and top management in organisations of different sizes operating in diverse sectors, including finance, marketing, and healthcare. They will be expected to work in public limited companies (such as Prudential, Abbey, Glaxo-Wellcome, Unilever), retail head offices, the BBC, public sector organisations such as the NHS and primary care trusts, civil service departments and local councils, as well as in the host of banks, brokers and regulators that make up the City, along with all the specialist support consultancies in IT and market research and forecasting, all of whom use data for the full range of decision making.
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Entry requirements
The course is aimed at those with a good Honours degree in a discipline with a significant quantitative and information technology element such as engineering and economics, and will be of particular interest to those with a mathematics or statistics degree. It will also appeal to operational, business, information and data analysts wishing or needing to strengthen their skills in extracting useful information from the increasing amount of data they are exposed to.
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Academic title
MSc Data Mining
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Course description
Introduction
The course has been designed to address the need to propel information gathering and data organisation and to discover hidden patterns and trends in large, and possibly distributed, databases. It focuses on the development of solutions to real-world problems through the use of applications and case studies, while providing a deep appreciation of the underlying models and techniques.
Course Content
You will be exposed to the entire data mining process; emphasis, however, will be on the discovery or modelling phase. You will apply techniques such as decision trees, logistic regression, neural networks, association rules, and cluster analysis in relation to areas such as customer relationship management, fraud detection, drug prescription, and public health planning and surveillance. You will also gain strong exposure to state-of-the-art software such as SAS Enterprise Miner, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services, Oracle Data Mining Suite.
Core modules
- Data Warehousing and Data Mining
- Database Languages
- Postgraduate Project Preparation and Planning
- Postgraduate Project
- Statistical Data Mining
- Statistical Modelling
- Plus either Data Mining Applications or Text Mining
Options, choose from
- Business Dynamics and Strategic Modelling
- Distributed Systems Programming
- Enterprise Resource Planning
- Management Accounting and Financial Modelling
- Medical Statistics and Experimental Design
- Multivariate Statistics and Marketing Decision Support
- Operational Research Techniques
- Free Choice Module
Teaching and Assessment
Teaching involves a variety of approaches, including coursework, to improve your analytical and problem solving skills, usage of industry standard software tools, presentation and academic writing as part of the assignments (through which transferable skills are developed), group work, and research methods involving the use of library and Internet sources to develop your research and analysis skills.
Taught modules may be assessed entirely through coursework, or include a component that normally takes the form of a two-hour exam at the end of the year. The coursework component of a module’s assessment profile may include a number of short phase tests taken during the semester in which the module is offered.
