Analytics Lab (A-Lab)

In the MIT Analytics Lab (A-Lab), student teams select and deliver a project using analytics, machine learning, and other methods of analysis to develop results that diagnose, enable, or uncover solutions to real business issues and opportunities. The course, which runs each fall semester, is presented by the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE) and is part of MIT Sloan School of Management’s suite of Action Learning offerings. The course is led by IDE faculty Sinan Aral.

During its first seven years, A-Lab has attracted a total of 500 students from a dozen MIT programs to work on over 130 projects spanning IoT, platforms, finance, e-commerce, retail, manufacturing, medical supply chains, workplace safety, and global health.

Some projects are tightly focused on dilemmas organizations currently face, which requires students to quickly understand particular business circumstances and domains before performing their descriptive, predictive, or causal analysis. Other projects are more open-ended, and students must think entrepreneurially about how to bring new value to existing data and suggest frontiers for future business opportunity.