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 and Microsoft 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. |
Editorial Review | I enjoyed Rachel and Cathy's book, it's readable, informative, and like no other book I've read on the topic of statistics or data science. --Andrew Gelman Professor of statistics and political science, and director of the Applied Statistics Center at Columbia University "I got a lot out of Doing Data Science, finding the chapter organization on business problem specification, analytics formulation, data access/wrangling, and computer code to be very helpful in understanding DS solutions." --Steve Miller Co-founder, OpenBI, LLC, a Chicago-based business intelligence services firm |