Book Image

Practical Data Analysis - Second Edition

By : Hector Cuesta, Dr. Sampath Kumar
Book Image

Practical Data Analysis - Second Edition

By: Hector Cuesta, Dr. Sampath Kumar

Overview of this book

Beyond buzzwords like Big Data or Data Science, there are a great opportunities to innovate in many businesses using data analysis to get data-driven products. Data analysis involves asking many questions about data in order to discover insights and generate value for a product or a service. This book explains the basic data algorithms without the theoretical jargon, and you’ll get hands-on turning data into insights using machine learning techniques. We will perform data-driven innovation processing for several types of data such as text, Images, social network graphs, documents, and time series, showing you how to implement large data processing with MongoDB and Apache Spark.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Practical Data Analysis - Second Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Chapter 1. Getting Started

Data analysis is the process in which raw data is ordered and organized to be used in methods that help to evaluate and explain the past and predict the future. Data analysis is not about the numbers, it is about making/asking questions, developing explanations, and testing hypotheses based on logical and analytical methods. Data analysis is a multidisciplinary field that combines computer science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistics, mathematics, and business domain, as shown in the following figure:

All of these skills are important for gaining a good understanding of the problem and its optimal solutions, so let's define those fields.