Getting in Front on Data

Author: Thomas C. Redman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781634621267
Category : Business
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
This book lays out the roles everyone, up and down the organization chart, can and must play to ensure that data is up to the demands of its use, in day-in, day-out work, decision-making, planning, and analytics. By now, everyone knows that bad data extorts an enormous toll, adding huge (though often hidden) costs, and making it more difficult to make good decisions and leverage advanced analyses. While the problems are pervasive and insidious, they are also solvable! As Tom Redman, "the Data Doc," explains in Getting in Front on Data, the secret lies in getting the right people in the right roles to "get in front" of the management and social issues that lead to bad data in the first place. Everyone should see himself or herself in this book. We are all both data customers and data creators--after all, we use data created by others and create data used by others. And all of us must step up to these roles. As data customers, we must clarify our most important needs and communicate them to data creators. As data creators, we must strive to meet those needs by finding and eliminating the root causes of error. Getting in Front on Data proposes new roles for data professionals as: embedded data managers, in helping data customers and creators complete their work, DQ team leads, in connecting customers and creators, pulling the entire program together, and training people on their new roles, data maestros, in providing deep expertise on the really tough problems, chief data architects, in establishing common data definitions, and technologists, in increasing scale and decreasing unit cost. Getting in Front on Data introduces a new role, the data provocateur, the motive force in attacking data quality properly! This book urges everyone to unleash their inner provocateur. Finally, it crystallizes what senior leaders must do if their entire organizations are to enjoy the benefits of high-quality data!

Doing Data Science

Author: Cathy O'Neil
Publisher: "O'Reilly Media, Inc."
ISBN: 144936389X
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
Now that people are aware that data can make the difference in an election or a business model, data science as an occupation is gaining ground. But how can you get started working in a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary field that’s so clouded in hype? This insightful book, based on Columbia University’s Introduction to Data Science class, tells you what you need to know. In many of these chapter-long lectures, data scientists from companies such as Google, Microsoft, and eBay share new algorithms, methods, and models by presenting case studies and the code they use. If you’re familiar with linear algebra, probability, and statistics, and have programming experience, this book is an ideal introduction to data science. Topics include: Statistical inference, exploratory data analysis, and the data science process Algorithms Spam filters, Naive Bayes, and data wrangling Logistic regression Financial modeling Recommendation engines and causality Data visualization Social networks and data journalism Data engineering, MapReduce, Pregel, and Hadoop Doing Data Science is collaboration between course instructor Rachel Schutt, Senior VP of Data Science at News Corp, and data science consultant Cathy O’Neil, a senior data scientist at Johnson Research Labs, who attended and blogged about the course.

Data Smart

Author: John W. Foreman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118839862
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 432

Book Description
Data Science gets thrown around in the press like it'smagic. Major retailers are predicting everything from when theircustomers are pregnant to when they want a new pair of ChuckTaylors. It's a brave new world where seemingly meaningless datacan be transformed into valuable insight to drive smart businessdecisions. But how does one exactly do data science? Do you have to hireone of these priests of the dark arts, the "data scientist," toextract this gold from your data? Nope. Data science is little more than using straight-forward steps toprocess raw data into actionable insight. And in DataSmart, author and data scientist John Foreman will show you howthat's done within the familiar environment of aspreadsheet. Why a spreadsheet? It's comfortable! You get to look at the dataevery step of the way, building confidence as you learn the tricksof the trade. Plus, spreadsheets are a vendor-neutral place tolearn data science without the hype. But don't let the Excel sheets fool you. This is a book forthose serious about learning the analytic techniques, the math andthe magic, behind big data. Each chapter will cover a different technique in aspreadsheet so you can follow along: Mathematical optimization, including non-linear programming andgenetic algorithms Clustering via k-means, spherical k-means, and graphmodularity Data mining in graphs, such as outlier detection Supervised AI through logistic regression, ensemble models, andbag-of-words models Forecasting, seasonal adjustments, and prediction intervalsthrough monte carlo simulation Moving from spreadsheets into the R programming language You get your hands dirty as you work alongside John through eachtechnique. But never fear, the topics are readily applicable andthe author laces humor throughout. You'll even learnwhat a dead squirrel has to do with optimization modeling, whichyou no doubt are dying to know.

Dear Data

Author: Giorgia Lupi
Publisher: Chronicle Books
ISBN: 1616895462
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
Equal parts mail art, data visualization, and affectionate correspondence, Dear Data celebrates "the infinitesimal, incomplete, imperfect, yet exquisitely human details of life," in the words of Maria Popova (Brain Pickings), who introduces this charming and graphically powerful book. For one year, Giorgia Lupi, an Italian living in New York, and Stefanie Posavec, an American in London, mapped the particulars of their daily lives as a series of hand-drawn postcards they exchanged via mail weekly—small portraits as full of emotion as they are data, both mundane and magical. Dear Data reproduces in pinpoint detail the full year's set of cards, front and back, providing a remarkable portrait of two artists connected by their attention to the details of their lives—including complaints, distractions, phone addictions, physical contact, and desires. These details illuminate the lives of two remarkable young women and also inspire us to map our own lives, including specific suggestions on what data to draw and how. A captivating and unique book for designers, artists, correspondents, friends, and lovers everywhere.

Leveraging ITS Data for Transit Market Research

Author: James G. Strathman
Publisher: Transportation Research Board
ISBN: 0309099420
Category : Intelligent transportation systems
Languages : en
Pages : 92

Book Description
TRB¿s Transit Cooperative Research Program (TCRP) Report 126: Leveraging ITS Data for Transit Market Research: A Practitioner¿s Guidebook examines intelligent transportation systems (ITS) and Transit ITS technologies currently in use, explores their potential to provide market research data, and presents methods for collecting and analyzing these data. The guidebook also highlights three case studies that illustrate how ITS data have been used to improve market research practices.

The Data Journalism Handbook

Author: Jonathan Gray
Publisher: "O'Reilly Media, Inc."
ISBN: 1449330029
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 243

Book Description
When you combine the sheer scale and range of digital information now available with a journalist’s "nose for news" and her ability to tell a compelling story, a new world of possibility opens up. With The Data Journalism Handbook, you’ll explore the potential, limits, and applied uses of this new and fascinating field. This valuable handbook has attracted scores of contributors since the European Journalism Centre and the Open Knowledge Foundation launched the project at MozFest 2011. Through a collection of tips and techniques from leading journalists, professors, software developers, and data analysts, you’ll learn how data can be either the source of data journalism or a tool with which the story is told—or both. Examine the use of data journalism at the BBC, the Chicago Tribune, the Guardian, and other news organizations Explore in-depth case studies on elections, riots, school performance, and corruption Learn how to find data from the Web, through freedom of information laws, and by "crowd sourcing" Extract information from raw data with tips for working with numbers and statistics and using data visualization Deliver data through infographics, news apps, open data platforms, and download links

Data Quality and Record Linkage Techniques

Author: Thomas N. Herzog
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 0387695052
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Book Description
This book offers a practical understanding of issues involved in improving data quality through editing, imputation, and record linkage. The first part of the book deals with methods and models, focusing on the Fellegi-Holt edit-imputation model, the Little-Rubin multiple-imputation scheme, and the Fellegi-Sunter record linkage model. The second part presents case studies in which these techniques are applied in a variety of areas, including mortgage guarantee insurance, medical, biomedical, highway safety, and social insurance as well as the construction of list frames and administrative lists. This book offers a mixture of practical advice, mathematical rigor, management insight and philosophy.

Data Driven

Author: Thomas C. Redman
Publisher: Harvard Business Press
ISBN: 1422163644
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
Your company's data has the potential to add enormous value to every facet of the organization -- from marketing and new product development to strategy to financial management. Yet if your company is like most, it's not using its data to create strategic advantage. Data sits around unused -- or incorrect data fouls up operations and decision making. In Data Driven, Thomas Redman, the "Data Doc," shows how to leverage and deploy data to sharpen your company's competitive edge and enhance its profitability. The author reveals: · The special properties that make data such a powerful asset · The hidden costs of flawed, outdated, or otherwise poor-quality data · How to improve data quality for competitive advantage · Strategies for exploiting your data to make better business decisions · The many ways to bring data to market · Ideas for dealing with political struggles over data and concerns about privacy rights Your company's data is a key business asset, and you need to manage it aggressively and professionally. Whether you're a top executive, an aspiring leader, or a product-line manager, this eye-opening book provides the tools and thinking you need to do that.

Protocols for Collecting and Using Traffic Data in Bridge Design

Author: Bala Sivakumar
Publisher: Transportation Research Board
ISBN: 0309155479
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 125

Book Description
TRB's National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Report 683: Protocols for Collecting and Using Traffic Data in Bridge Design explores a set of protocols and methodologies for using available recent truck traffic data to develop and calibrate vehicular loads for superstructure design, fatigue design, deck design, and design for overload permits. The protocols are geared to address the collection, processing, and use of national weigh-in-motion (WIM) data. The report also gives practical examples of implementing these protocols with recent national WIM data drawn from states/sites around the country with different traffic exposures, load spectra, and truck configurations. The material in this report will be of immediate interest to bridge engineers. This report replaces NCHRP Web-Only Document 135: Protocols for Collecting and Using Traffic Data in Bridge Design. Appendices A through F for NCHRP Report 683 are available only online.

Data Visualization

Author: Kieran Healy
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691181624
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Book Description
An accessible primer on how to create effective graphics from data This book provides students and researchers a hands-on introduction to the principles and practice of data visualization. It explains what makes some graphs succeed while others fail, how to make high-quality figures from data using powerful and reproducible methods, and how to think about data visualization in an honest and effective way. Data Visualization builds the reader’s expertise in ggplot2, a versatile visualization library for the R programming language. Through a series of worked examples, this accessible primer then demonstrates how to create plots piece by piece, beginning with summaries of single variables and moving on to more complex graphics. Topics include plotting continuous and categorical variables; layering information on graphics; producing effective “small multiple” plots; grouping, summarizing, and transforming data for plotting; creating maps; working with the output of statistical models; and refining plots to make them more comprehensible. Effective graphics are essential to communicating ideas and a great way to better understand data. This book provides the practical skills students and practitioners need to visualize quantitative data and get the most out of their research findings. Provides hands-on instruction using R and ggplot2 Shows how the “tidyverse” of data analysis tools makes working with R easier and more consistent Includes a library of data sets, code, and functions