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

Building a Graph from the Wholesale Wine Data

In this chapter, I want to demonstrate how to detect clusters within your customer purchase data by representing that data as a graph. Some businesses have data that's already graphable, such as the Medicare referral data discussed earlier.

But in this case, the wine purchase matrix from Chapter 2 does not represent customer-to-customer relationships out of the box.

To start, you should figure out how to graph the wholesale wine dataset as a network. And that means constructing an adjacency matrix similar to the Friends adjacency matrix shown in Figure 5.2. From there you'll be able to visualize and...