Data Smart

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.

Most people are approaching data science all wrong. Here’s how to do it right.

Not to disillusion you, but data scientists are not mystical practitioners of magical arts. Data science is something you can do. Really. This book shows you the significant data science techniques, how they work, how to use them, and how they benefit your business, large or small. It’s not about coding or database technologies. It’s about turning raw data into insight you can act upon, and doing it as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Roll up your sleeves and let’s get going.

Relax — it’s just a spreadsheet

Visit the companion website at www.wiley.com/go/datasmart to download spreadsheets for each chapter, and follow them as you learn about:

• Artificial intelligence using the general linear model, ensemble methods, and naive Bayes
• Clustering via k-means, spherical k-means, and graph modularity