With the integration of social media with businesses, there have emerged new data analytical needs involving unstructured data, especially textual data like online product reviews, Twitter/Facebook messages, transcripts of phone call logs. In this course, we will learn about some of the new analytical needs that businesses have and how we can solve them using Python programming. The course is designed for students with some basic background in programming. Students who do not have any programming knowledge and those who need to refresh their programming skills are strongly advised to do the Pre-Course Assignment mentioned below. By the end of this course, students are expected to: 1.understand the various steps involved in solving a business analytics problem 2.understand the data collection and analytical challenges faced by firms 3.understand how textual data can be collected and analyzed to derive insights 4.write basic programs using Python a.understand basic programming concepts, such as data types, conditions, and functions b.perform standard input/output operations, such as read and write into files c.use Python to collect data from the Internet d.use Python modules to address analytical problems 5.write data analytical programs using Python for the following three tasks: a.Web scrapping b.Sentiment analysis c.Topic modeling