Practical Data Analysis

For small businesses, analyzing the information contained in their data using open source technology could be game-changing. All you need is some basic programming and mathematical skills to do just that.

Overview

• Explore how to analyze your data in various innovative ways and turn them into insight
• Learn to use the D3.js visualization tool for exploratory data analysis
• Understand how to work with graphs and social data analysis
• Discover how to perform advanced query techniques and run MapReduce on MongoDB

In Detail

Plenty of small businesses face big amounts of data but lack the internal skills to support quantitative analysis. Understanding how to harness the power of data analysis using the latest open source technology can lead them to providing better customer service, the visualization of customer needs, or even the ability to obtain fresh insights about the performance of previous products. Practical Data Analysis is a book ideal for home and small business users who want to slice and dice the data they have on hand with minimum hassle.

Practical Data Analysis is a hands-on guide to understanding the nature of your data and turn it into insight. It will introduce you to the use of machine learning techniques, social networks analytics, and econometrics to help your clients get insights about the pool of data they have at hand. Performing data preparation and processing over several kinds of data such as text, images, graphs, documents, and time series will also be covered.

Practical Data Analysis presents a detailed exploration of the current work in data analysis through self-contained projects. First you will explore the basics of data preparation and transformation through OpenRefine. Then you will get started with exploratory data analysis using the D3js visualization framework. You will also be introduced to some of the machine learning techniques such as, classification, regression, and clusterization through practical projects such as spam classification, predicting gold prices, and finding clusters in your Facebook friends' network. You will learn how to solve problems in text classification, simulation, time series forecast, social media, and MapReduce through detailed projects. Finally you will work with large amounts of Twitter data using MapReduce to perform a sentiment analysis implemented in Python and MongoDB.

Practical Data Analysis contains a combination of carefully selected algorithms and data scrubbing that enables you to turn your data into insight.

What you will learn from this book

• Work with data to get meaningful results from your data analysis projects
• Visualize your data to find trends and correlations
• Build your own image similarity search engine
• Learn how to forecast numerical values from time series data
• Create an interactive visualization for your social media graph
• Explore the MapReduce framework in MongoDB
• Create interactive simulations with D3js

Approach

Practical Data Analysis is a practical, step-by-step guide to empower small businesses to manage and analyze your data and extract valuable information from the data

Who this book is written for

This book is for developers, small business users, and analysts who want to implement data analysis and visualization for their company in a practical way. You need no prior experience with data analysis or data processing; however, basic knowledge of programming, statistics, and linear algebra is assumed.