Chapter 1
Getting Started – A Motivating Example
Section 1
The Course Overview
In this section, we will learn what data mining actually means. We will contrast it with data science and applied statistics and will show a motivating example in order to give you an appetizer for the whole course. R is a bit hard to learn, especially if you already have programming skills in other languages because it works slightly differently. First, it is actually a functional language (not to confuse with procedural languages), and second, it is a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) especially made for data processing and not for, let’s say, implementing a web server.