Case Study: University of Colorado achieves classroom-ready predictive analytics education with DataRobot

Teaching Predictive Analytics at the University of Colorado

The University of Colorado, led by Dr. Kai Larsen at the Leeds School of Business, faced the challenge of teaching predictive analytics to a broad mix of undergraduate business students. Core obstacles included algorithm-specific preprocessing, algorithm evaluation and selection, and the foundational data-blending skills (accessing, joining and aggregating disparate sources) needed before modeling. Larsen adopted DataRobot—alongside Alteryx for data preparation—to make advanced predictive analytics teachable at scale.

DataRobot’s cloud platform automated preprocessing, ran and ranked many algorithms via cross‑validation and leaderboards, and blended top models, while Alteryx handled data access and transformation. The result: workflows that once took months were compressed into hours—DataRobot outperformed a technical PhD student’s months-long effort by a factor of two in one hour—and students can now complete multiple, management-ready predictive projects in a day. DataRobot thus improved classroom accessibility, speed and model performance for the University of Colorado.

University of Colorado

Kai Larsen

Associate Professor of Information Systems Leeds School of Business