Empirical studies in economics and business analysis is entering a new era of “Big Data” where a diverse range of data sources have become available to researchers. Examples include spatiotemporal data from Google Map and satellite images, massive amounts of international trade flows data, textual data from newspaper and social media, and network data from firm and individual business relations.

How can we take advantage of these new data sources and improve our understanding of the economy and the business world? This course introduces various machine learning, spatial analysis methods and their applications in big data analytics for business. Specifically, R and Python programming languages will be introduced to for collecting, cleaning, visualising and analysing data. They will also learn basic machine learning algorithms and data science tools that are applied in economics and business studies.