AICPA Certificate Programs

Enhance your data translation skills to help your organization reach its goals.

The Application of Data Analysis Essentials Certificate offers hands-on experience regarding how to analyze data and calculate fundamental aspects of your data sets. This certificate program provides the core concepts and definitions of data analytics, which explain the anatomy of data as a medium, and provides fundamental statistical analysis techniques for beginning to glean useful information from data.

First, you will learn the different types of variables that make up a data set and perform meaningful calculations on data to discover and explore relationships that yield insights: central tendency, variability, probability, and distribution. Then we will delve into recognizing these qualities in their different forms and how to utilize them in practical business situations. This program offers straightforward exercises to help you practice and immediately apply what you've learned. You will also get exposure to and practice with useful concepts such as quartiles, variance, and standard deviation.

Finally, you will be introduced to one of the most powerful tools available for analyzing data: the open-source "R" platform. You will be guided through an actual use case for analyzing data using R and complete your learning by seeing how the statistical concepts you've just learned can be applied in a real-world example. By completing this certificate, you will have a solid grasp of core statistical techniques underpinning an analytics practice and hands-on-practice using them.

Topics Discussed

• The nature and types of different variables in data sets and how to use them
• Fundamental statistical concepts for working with data
• Characteristics of data that can be used for conducting analysis
• Basic calculations for analyzing and discovering useful insights from data sets
• How to understand and calculate probability from a data set
• Different types of distribution and how they can be used
• Guided exposure to the open-source R platform and its analytics capabilities
• A practical case study exploring how statistical analysis can be used in a common fraud-detection scenario
• Examples and practice exercises throughout the program to reinforce what you learn

Learning Objectives

• Determine and classify variables.
• Calculate meaningful statistics, including central tendency, measurement and variability, basic probability, conditional probability, advanced probabilities, discrete distributions, and continuous distributions.
• Analyze statistics and distributions in R case study.
• Analyze fraud-detection case study.

Who Will It Benefit?

Accounting and finance professionals, especially those interested in learning and applying data analysis techniques to help their organizations make informed, data-driven business decisions.

Details

• Field of Study: Specialized Knowledge
• Level: Intermediate
• CPE Credit: 15