Optional Class
Tonight my Data Analysis prof scheduled an optional class for the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. Gracefully, Prof. Gray offered to analyze data that anyone wanted to volunteer for the purpose of using regression in the real world. One of the students offered some records of his service-related business. It was really useful to get a sense of the issues that you actually face when trying to analyze business data.
I wish I had this type of skills in my previous job as a lead development engineer at Diramed. There we were comparing Raman spectra collected from a patient's finger in order to non-invasively measure the blood glucose. There we always believed that the patient's biometrics would affect our prediction accuracy. Unfortunately, the company ran out of funds before we could that this type of analysis.
During my engineering schooling I never ran through this type of analysis. These regression tools really weren't widely available ten years ago.