Experiments, surveys, measurements, and observations all generate data. These data can provide useful insights for solving problems, guiding decisions, and formulating strategy. Progressing from relatively unprocessed data to insight, and doing so efficiently, reliably, and confidently, does not come easily, and yet gaining insights from data is a fundamental skill for science as well as many other fields and often overlooked in most textbooks of statistics and data analysis. This accessible and engaging book provides readers with the knowledge, experience, and confidence to work with data and unlock essential information (insights) from data summaries and visualisations. Based on a proven and successful undergraduate course structure, it charts the journey from initial question, through data preparation, import, cleaning, tidying, checking, double-checking, manipulation, and final visualization. These basic skills are sufficient to gain useful insights from data without the need for any statistics; there is enough to learn about even before delving into that world! The book focuses on gaining insights from data via visualisations and summaries. The journey from raw data to insights is clearly illustrated by means of a comprehensive Workflow Demonstration in the book featuring data collected in a real-life study and applicable to many types of question, study, and data. Along the way, readers discover how to efficiently and intuitively use R, RStudio, and tidyverse software, learning from the detailed descriptions of each step in the instructional journey to progress from the raw data to creating elegant and informative visualisations that reveal answers to the initial questions posed. There are an additional three demonstrations online! Insights from Data with R is suitable for undergraduate students and their instructors in the life and environmental sciences seeking to harness the power of R, RStudio, and tidyverse software to master the valuable and prerequisite skills of working with and gaining insights from data.

Gain sharp insights into your data and solve real-world data science problems with R—from data munging to modeling and visualization About This Book Handle your data with precision and care for optimal business intelligence Restructure and transform your data to inform decision-making Packed with practical advice and tips to help you get to grips with data mining Who This Book Is For If you are a data scientist or R developer who wants to explore and optimize your use of R's advanced features and tools, this is the book for you. A basic knowledge of R is required, along with an understanding of database logic. What You Will Learn Connect to and load data from R's range of powerful databases Successfully fetch and parse structured and unstructured data Transform and restructure your data with efficient R packages Define and build complex statistical models with glm Develop and train machine learning algorithms Visualize social networks and graph data Deploy supervised and unsupervised classification algorithms Discover how to visualize spatial data with R In Detail R is an essential language for sharp and successful data analysis. Its numerous features and ease of use make it a powerful way of mining, managing, and interpreting large sets of data. In a world where understanding big data has become key, by mastering R you will be able to deal with your data effectively and efficiently. This book will give you the guidance you need to build and develop your knowledge and expertise. Bridging the gap between theory and practice, this book will help you to understand and use data for a competitive advantage. Beginning with taking you through essential data mining and management tasks such as munging, fetching, cleaning, and restructuring, the book then explores different model designs and the core components of effective analysis. You will then discover how to optimize your use of machine learning algorithms for classification and recommendation systems beside the traditional and more recent statistical methods. Style and approach Covering the essential tasks and skills within data science, Mastering Data Analysis provides you with solutions to the challenges of data science. Each section gives you a theoretical overview before demonstrating how to put the theory to work with real-world use cases and hands-on examples.

Introduction to Data Science: Data Analysis and Prediction Algorithms with R introduces concepts and skills that can help you tackle real-world data analysis challenges. It covers concepts from probability, statistical inference, linear regression, and machine learning. It also helps you develop skills such as R programming, data wrangling, data visualization, predictive algorithm building, file organization with UNIX/Linux shell, version control with Git and GitHub, and reproducible document preparation. This book is a textbook for a first course in data science. No previous knowledge of R is necessary, although some experience with programming may be helpful. The book is divided into six parts: R, data visualization, statistics with R, data wrangling, machine learning, and productivity tools. Each part has several chapters meant to be presented as one lecture. The author uses motivating case studies that realistically mimic a data scientist’s experience. He starts by asking specific questions and answers these through data analysis so concepts are learned as a means to answering the questions. Examples of the case studies included are: US murder rates by state, self-reported student heights, trends in world health and economics, the impact of vaccines on infectious disease rates, the financial crisis of 2007-2008, election forecasting, building a baseball team, image processing of hand-written digits, and movie recommendation systems. The statistical concepts used to answer the case study questions are only briefly introduced, so complementing with a probability and statistics textbook is highly recommended for in-depth understanding of these concepts. If you read and understand the chapters and complete the exercises, you will be prepared to learn the more advanced concepts and skills needed to become an expert.

Learn how to use R to turn raw data into insight, knowledge, and understanding. This book introduces you to R, RStudio, and the tidyverse, a collection of R packages designed to work together to make data science fast, fluent, and fun. Suitable for readers with no previous programming experience, R for Data Science is designed to get you doing data science as quickly as possible. Authors Hadley Wickham and Garrett Grolemund guide you through the steps of importing, wrangling, exploring, and modeling your data and communicating the results. You'll get a complete, big-picture understanding of the data science cycle, along with basic tools you need to manage the details. Each section of the book is paired with exercises to help you practice what you've learned along the way. You'll learn how to: Wrangle—transform your datasets into a form convenient for analysis Program—learn powerful R tools for solving data problems with greater clarity and ease Explore—examine your data, generate hypotheses, and quickly test them Model—provide a low-dimensional summary that captures true "signals" in your dataset Communicate—learn R Markdown for integrating prose, code, and results

A comprehensive textbook on data analysis for business, applied economics and public policy that uses case studies with real-world data.

Tap into the realm of social media and unleash the power of analytics for data-driven insights using R About This Book A practical guide written to help leverage the power of the R eco-system to extract, process, analyze, visualize and model social media data Learn about data access, retrieval, cleaning, and curation methods for data originating from various social media platforms. Visualize and analyze data from social media platforms to understand and model complex relationships using various concepts and techniques such as Sentiment Analysis, Topic Modeling, Text Summarization, Recommendation Systems, Social Network Analysis, Classification, and Clustering. Who This Book Is For It is targeted at IT professionals, Data Scientists, Analysts, Developers, Machine Learning Enthusiasts, social media marketers and anyone with a keen interest in data, analytics, and generating insights from social data. Some background experience in R would be helpful, but not necessary, since this book is written keeping in mind, that readers can have varying levels of expertise. What You Will Learn Learn how to tap into data from diverse social media platforms using the R ecosystem Use social media data to formulate and solve real-world problems Analyze user social networks and communities using concepts from graph theory and network analysis Learn to detect opinion and sentiment, extract themes, topics, and trends from unstructured noisy text data from diverse social media channels Understand the art of representing actionable insights with effective visualizations Analyze data from major social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Foursquare, Github, StackExchange, and so on Learn to leverage popular R packages such as ggplot2, topicmodels, caret, e1071, tm, wordcloud, twittR, Rfacebook, dplyr, reshape2, and many more In Detail The Internet has truly become humongous, especially with the rise of various forms of social media in the last decade, which give users a platform to express themselves and also communicate and collaborate with each other. This book will help the reader to understand the current social media landscape and to learn how analytics can be leveraged to derive insights from it. This data can be analyzed to gain valuable insights into the behavior and engagement of users, organizations, businesses, and brands. It will help readers frame business problems and solve them using social data. The book will also cover several practical real-world use cases on social media using R and its advanced packages to utilize data science methodologies such as sentiment analysis, topic modeling, text summarization, recommendation systems, social network analysis, classification, and clustering. This will enable readers to learn different hands-on approaches to obtain data from diverse social media sources such as Twitter and Facebook. It will also show readers how to establish detailed workflows to process, visualize, and analyze data to transform social data into actionable insights. Style and approach This book follows a step-by-step approach with detailed strategies for understanding, extracting, analyzing, visualizing, and modeling data from several major social network platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Flickr, Github, and StackExchange. The chapters cover several real-world use cases and leverage data science, machine learning, network analysis, and graph theory concepts along with the R ecosystem, including popular packages such as ggplot2, caret,dplyr, topicmodels, tm, and so on.

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

Chapter 7. Case Study : Comparing Twitter Archives; Getting the Data and Distribution of Tweets; Word Frequencies; Comparing Word Usage; Changes in Word Use; Favorites and Retweets; Summary; Chapter 8. Case Study : Mining NASA Metadata; How Data Is Organized at NASA; Wrangling and Tidying the Data; Some Initial Simple Exploration; Word Co-ocurrences and Correlations; Networks of Description and Title Words; Networks of Keywords; Calculating tf-idf for the Description Fields; What Is tf-idf for the Description Field Words?; Connecting Description Fields to Keywords; Topic Modeling.

Use Product Analytics to Understand Consumer Behavior and Change It at Scale Product Analytics is a complete, hands-on guide to generating actionable business insights from customer data. Experienced data scientist and enterprise manager Joanne Rodrigues introduces practical statistical techniques for determining why things happen and how to change what people do at scale. She complements these with powerful social science techniques for creating better theories, designing better metrics, and driving more rapid and sustained behavior change. Writing for entrepreneurs, product managers/marketers, and other business practitioners, Rodrigues teaches through intuitive examples from both web and offline environments. Avoiding math-heavy explanations, she guides you step by step through choosing the right techniques and algorithms for each application, running analyses in R, and getting answers you can trust. Develop core metrics and effective KPIs for user analytics in any web product Truly understand statistical inference, and the differences between correlation and causation Conduct more effective A/B tests Build intuitive predictive models to capture user behavior in products Use modern, quasi-experimental designs and statistical matching to tease out causal effects from observational data Improve response through uplift modeling and other sophisticated targeting methods Project business costs/subgroup population changes via advanced demographic projection Whatever your product or service, this guide can help you create precision-targeted marketing campaigns, improve consumer satisfaction and engagement, and grow revenue and profits. Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.

Master the art and science of data storytelling—with frameworks and techniques to help you craft compelling stories with data. The ability to effectively communicate with data is no longer a luxury in today’s economy; it is a necessity. Transforming data into visual communication is only one part of the picture. It is equally important to engage your audience with a narrative—to tell a story with the numbers. Effective Data Storytelling will teach you the essential skills necessary to communicate your insights through persuasive and memorable data stories. Narratives are more powerful than raw statistics, more enduring than pretty charts. When done correctly, data stories can influence decisions and drive change. Most other books focus only on data visualization while neglecting the powerful narrative and psychological aspects of telling stories with data. Author Brent Dykes shows you how to take the three central elements of data storytelling—data, narrative, and visuals—and combine them for maximum effectiveness. Taking a comprehensive look at all the elements of data storytelling, this unique book will enable you to: Transform your insights and data visualizations into appealing, impactful data stories Learn the fundamental elements of a data story and key audience drivers Understand the differences between how the brain processes facts and narrative Structure your findings as a data narrative, using a four-step storyboarding process Incorporate the seven essential principles of better visual storytelling into your work Avoid common data storytelling mistakes by learning from historical and modern examples Effective Data Storytelling: How to Drive Change with Data, Narrative and Visuals is a must-have resource for anyone who communicates regularly with data, including business professionals, analysts, marketers, salespeople, financial managers, and educators.