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

Visualizing a Simple Graph

The TV show Friends was one of the most popular sitcoms of the 1990s and early 2000s. The show centered around six friends: Ross, Rachel, Joey, Chandler, Monica, and Phoebe. If you've never heard of the show or these characters, you're either super young or trapped in a cave.

These six characters become involved in a lot of romances with each other of various types: real romances, fantasy romances that never amount to anything, play romances based on some dare or competition, and so on.

Think of these characters as six nodes or vertices on the graph. The relationships between them are edges. Off the top of my head, I can think of these edges:

  • Ross and Rachel, obviously
  • Monica and Chandler end up married.
  • Joey and Rachel have a little romance going but ultimately decide it's too weird.
  • Chandler and Rachel meet each other in a flashback episode over a pool table mishap, and Rachel imagines what it'd be like to be with Chandler.
  • Chandler and...