Xiaojia Guo - Teaching

Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland - College Park

Machine Learning for Decision Support (2024)

PhD seminar course
Topics covered in the course: advanced predict then optimize with ML, ML and controllable independent variables, ML and operations management, practice-based research in ML for decision-making, reinforcement learning

Core course for Online MBA students
Topics covered in the course: descriptive statistics and probability, data visualization, confidence interval, hypothesis testing, linear regression, forecasting

Core course for M.S. in Business Analytics and M.S. in Information Systems students
Topics covered in the course: exploratory analysis, explanatory analysis, visual cues, visualization in R and Tableau, networks, google analytics, dynamic dashboard and stories, story telling with data.

Second year core course for BS.c. Management Science students
Topics covered in the course: time series forecasting; regressions; tree-based models (CART, random forest abd xgboost); ensemble techniques (robust means and stacking); text analysis (Lemmatization, word cloud and sentiment analysis); cloud computing.
Sample case studies dicussed in class: Yahoo's acquisiton of Tumblr (predict Tumblr's monthly audience growth); Predicting Finnie Mae's loan default rates; Tweets, retweets, and entrepreneurship (download tweets from Twitter's API and predict the number of retweets based on a tweet's sentiment score).

Elective course for MBA and EMBA students
Teach students to apply Excel, Microsoft Project and @risk to plan and track projects in workshops.