Risk
AnalysisCornell

Certificate Program

A foundation in risk analysis is a crucial skill set in today's business marketplace. When you can understand risk and apply strategies to manage it, you set yourself up for success in an ever-changing world.

In this course, you will explore key risk evaluation strategies and tools. You will begin by delving into the basics of risk analysis, studying hazards, risk management strategies, and vulnerability identification. You will then broaden your focus to visualizing and estimating risk, discussing models such as risk matrices that categorize risks by likelihood and consequence. Finally, you will analyze the causes and effects of adverse events, constructing event trees and performing fault tree analysis using practical tools like Python and R. By the end of this course, you will have a firm grasp of risk analysis and evaluation, including how to assess the likelihood and effects of adverse events.

Evaluating risk can feel difficult without the proper statistical techniques in your toolbelt. To give yourself that foundation, you will need to understand both the concepts and the tools involved in the process.

In this course, you will walk through the process of risk assessment using several statistical techniques. You will begin by learning to monitor and analyze variations to ensure product or service quality. You will then practice evaluating risk using discrete distributions and summarizing findings using common statistical techniques for risk analysis, including skewness and distributions such as log-normal distributions. You will also gain familiarity with critical functions and concepts in risk analysis, including power law functions and distributions, semi-variance, volatility and beta, and value at risk (VaR), a financial metric used to assess potential asset or portfolio losses. Finally, you will examine design methodologies geared toward improving product reliability, including design for reliability, design for Six Sigma, and quality control. By the end of this course, you will be well-equipped to analyze and evaluate risk using numerous statistical methods.

You are required to have completed the following course or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Risk Analysis Foundations

Once you have a sense of risk for a situation, how can you model that risk using the most common tools of the industry?

In this course, you will assess a given situation, select the appropriate modeling tools, and perform a risk analysis. You will begin by identifying the attributes that make a model strong, providing you with a blueprint for creating user-friendly and reliable models for risk analysis. You will explore the most commonly used risk analysis tools, including simulation, fault trees, event trees, Bayesian networks, and statistical tools. Your examination of simulation tools will have you quantifying risk by creating a Monte Carlo simulation and constructing a Bayesian network. Finally, you will discuss mitigation, diversification, and transfer of risk as well as how to pick the correct combination for a given situation. By the end of this course, you will have the necessary foundation to model risk and apply strategies to set you up for success.

You are required to have completed the following courses or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Risk Analysis Foundations
• Risk Evaluation

Reducing risk in business and life is a goal for many of us, but how can we effectively assess risk in a world where everyone's perceptions are so different?

In this course, you will explore risk perception, which describes how each person views and measures the nature and severity of danger. Unlike the numerical depiction of risks, risk perception is influenced by personal experiences, mental activities, context, and inherent personality traits. You will discuss the effects of risk perception on risk evaluation and decision making. You will then explore models such as expected utility, bounded rationality, and prospect theory, giving you a foundation in the elements of risk perception. Finally, you will investigate cognitive shortcuts and biases, including the availability heuristic, anchoring and adjustment, confirmation bias, and overconfidence, and determine their repercussions on behavior. These skills will give you the tools to examine the risk perceptions of various stakeholders, address cognitive biases, and identify suitable models for decision making under uncertainty. By the end of this course, you will be equipped with the methods and insights necessary to effectively evaluate and manage risks, even in complicated situations.

You are required to have completed the following courses or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Risk Analysis Foundations
• Risk Evaluation
• Risk Modeling