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

Don't Kid Yourself

Folks who don't know how AI models work often experience some combination of awe and creepiness when hearing about how these models can predict the future. But to paraphrase the great 1992 film Sneakers, “Don't kid yourself. It's not that [intelligent].”

Why? Because AI models are no smarter than the sum of their parts. At a simplistic level, you feed a supervised AI algorithm some historical data, purchases at Target for example, and you tell the algorithm, “Hey, these purchases were from pregnant people, and these other purchases were from not-so-pregnant people.” The algorithm munches on the data and out pops a model. In the future, you feed the model a customer's purchases and ask, “Is this person pregnant?” and the model answers, “No, that's a 26-year-old dude living in his mom's basement.”

That's extremely helpful, but the model isn't a magician. It just cleverly...