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

Wait, What? You're Pregnant?

In a recent Forbes article, it was reported that Target had created an artificial intelligence (AI) model that could predict when a customer was pregnant and use that information to start targeting them with pregnancy-related marketing and offers. New parents blow a lot of money on the accouterments of child rearing, and what better time to turn them into loyal customers than before the baby even shows up? They'll be buying the store brand diapers for years!

This story about Target is just one of many that have peppered the press recently. Watson won Jeopardy!. Netflix offered a million dollar prize to improve its recommendation system. The Obama re-election campaign used artificial intelligence to help direct ground, online, and on the air media and fundraising operations. And then there's Kaggle.com, where competitions are popping up to predict everything from whether a driver is getting sleepy to how much a grocery shopper will spend on groceries...