Book Image

Data Smart

By : John W. Foreman
Book Image

Data Smart

By: John W. Foreman

Overview of this book

Data Science gets thrown around in the press like it's magic. Major retailers are predicting everything from when their customers are pregnant to when they want a new pair of Chuck Taylors. It's a brave new world where seemingly meaningless data can be transformed into valuable insight to drive smart business decisions. But how does one exactly do data science? Do you have to hire one of these priests of the dark arts, the "data scientist," to extract this gold from your data? Nope. Data science is little more than using straight-forward steps to process raw data into actionable insight. And in Data Smart, author and data scientist John Foreman will show you how that's done within the familiar environment of a spreadsheet. Why a spreadsheet? It's comfortable! You get to look at the data every step of the way, building confidence as you learn the tricks of the trade. Plus, spreadsheets are a vendor-neutral place to learn data science without the hype. But don't let the Excel sheets fool you. This is a book for those serious about learning the analytic techniques, math and the magic, behind big data.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Cover
2
Credits
3
About the Author
4
About the Technical Editors
5
Acknowledgments
18
End User License Agreement

Wrapping Up

If you stuck with me on those last couple of models, then bravo. Those suckers weren't toy problems. In fact, this may be the hardest chapter in this book. It's all downhill from here!

Here's a little recap of what you just learned:

  • Simple linear programming
  • The minimax formulation
  • Adding integer variables and constraints
  • Modeling if-then logic using a “Big M” constraint
  • Modeling the product of decision variables in a linear way
  • The normal distribution, central limit theorem, cumulative distribution functions, and the Monte Carlo method
  • Using the Monte Carlo method to model risk within a linear program

Your head is probably spinning with all sorts of applications of this stuff to your business right now. Or you've just downed a stiff drink and never want to deal with linear programming again. I hope it's the former, because the truth is, you can get arbitrarily creative and complex with linear programming. In many business contexts...