About this Book
This book is about data science: a field that uses results from statistics, machine learning, and computer science to create predictive models. Because of the broad nature of data science, it’s important to discuss it a bit and to outline the approach we take in this book.
The statistician William S. Cleveland defined data science as an interdisciplinary field larger than statistics itself. We define data science as managing the process that can transform hypotheses and data into actionable predictions. Typical predictive analytic goals include predicting who will win an election, what products will sell well together, which loans will default, or which advertisements will be clicked on. The data scientist is responsible for acquiring the data, managing the data, choosing the modeling technique, writing the code, and verifying the results.
Because data science draws on so many disciplines, it’s often a “second calling.” Many of the best data scientists we meet started as programmers, statisticians, business intelligence analysts, or scientists. By adding a few more techniques to their repertoire, they became excellent data scientists. That observation drives this book: we introduce the practical skills needed by the data scientist by concretely working through all of the common project steps on real data. Some steps you’ll know better than we do, some you’ll pick up quickly, and some you may need to research further.
