Learn to:

• Deduce, discover, and communicate valuable insights from structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data sources
• Use meaningful visualizations to display and interpret data
• Take advantage of data processing tools like Hadoop^® and MapReduce
• Turn your organization's data into a competitive advantage

Gain in-depth insight into your business with data science—this book makes it easy!

Big data is a big deal. This book helps you harness its power and give your business that all-important competitive edge. You'll learn to manage large amounts of data within hardware and software limitations, merge data sources, ensure consistent reporting, and interpret the data to tell your business story in a way that's easily understood.

• Get a grip on data science — understand what it is, who uses it, and what it can do
• How big is it — see how big data is defined and how to handle it with MapReduce, Hadoop, and alternative solutions
• It's probable — explore probability and statistics in interpreting your data
• Model ideas — learn about mathematical modeling, fuzzy multi-criteria programming, and modeling spatial data with statistics
• Make it visual — examine different types of data visualization techniques and learn to choose the style that's right for your purpose and your audience
• Ideal technology — learn where Python^®, Open Source R, SQL, or even Excel^® may be the tool you need
• The sky's the limit — see how data science can help solve environmental issues, drive e-commerce, and even predict criminal activity

Open the book and find:

• The basics of data science
• Ways to define big data
• How business benefits from data science
• Information about regression and clustering techniques
• Various visualization options
• Tips for designing great dashboards
• How data science is used in journalism
• Ten free data science tools and applications

Lillian Pierson, P.E. is an entrepreneurial data scientist and professional environmental engineer. She's the founder of Data-Mania, a start-up that focuses mainly on web analytics, data-driven growth services, data journalism, and data science training services. She also covers the topics of data science, analytics, and statistics for prominent organizations like IBM and UBM.