How To Talk To Data Scientists

Every major company has or will soon have a data science program. Most fail, expensively, imperiling their executive sponsors. Unfortunately, executives have been misled to focus on the latest buzzwords. Although buzzwords change— big data, data science, machine learning, deep learning, and artificial intelligence –the distraction from fundamentals manifests as a predictable trajectory from exuberant program launch, to stagnation, to awkward decommissioning. After architecting data science programs at over a dozen companies, across sectors and scales, Dr. Elser has formulated a reliable framework for successful data science programs. Surprisingly, software and algorithms are secondary. Rather, the key is understanding how the available data aligns to the problem to be solved. The business executive understands the problem sufficiently to enforce this alignment, while data scientists act on it. But executives tend to underestimate their role and thereby fail to construct the necessary connective tissue with their data scientists. This book provides business executives with a concrete exercise, populating a “Master Table,” accessible to nontechnical managers and data scientists, which serves as the connective tissue between them. Rather than teach a diluted version of data science, this book describes how to start projects and how to detect and fix problems—the moments when leadership is critical. Insights are provided through real world examples, including a Playbook featuring common projects. The intended audience is executives (C-suite through VP). However, ambitious mid-level managers and data scientists will also benefit.

Think about your data intelligently and ask the right questions Key FeaturesMaster data cleaning techniques necessary to perform real-world data science and machine learning tasksSpot common problems with dirty data and develop flexible solutions from first principlesTest and refine your newly acquired skills through detailed exercises at the end of each chapterBook Description Data cleaning is the all-important first step to successful data science, data analysis, and machine learning. If you work with any kind of data, this book is your go-to resource, arming you with the insights and heuristics experienced data scientists had to learn the hard way. In a light-hearted and engaging exploration of different tools, techniques, and datasets real and fictitious, Python veteran David Mertz teaches you the ins and outs of data preparation and the essential questions you should be asking of every piece of data you work with. Using a mixture of Python, R, and common command-line tools, Cleaning Data for Effective Data Science follows the data cleaning pipeline from start to end, focusing on helping you understand the principles underlying each step of the process. You'll look at data ingestion of a vast range of tabular, hierarchical, and other data formats, impute missing values, detect unreliable data and statistical anomalies, and generate synthetic features. The long-form exercises at the end of each chapter let you get hands-on with the skills you've acquired along the way, also providing a valuable resource for academic courses. What you will learnIngest and work with common data formats like JSON, CSV, SQL and NoSQL databases, PDF, and binary serialized data structuresUnderstand how and why we use tools such as pandas, SciPy, scikit-learn, Tidyverse, and BashApply useful rules and heuristics for assessing data quality and detecting bias, like Benford’s law and the 68-95-99.7 ruleIdentify and handle unreliable data and outliers, examining z-score and other statistical propertiesImpute sensible values into missing data and use sampling to fix imbalancesUse dimensionality reduction, quantization, one-hot encoding, and other feature engineering techniques to draw out patterns in your dataWork carefully with time series data, performing de-trending and interpolationWho this book is for This book is designed to benefit software developers, data scientists, aspiring data scientists, teachers, and students who work with data. If you want to improve your rigor in data hygiene or are looking for a refresher, this book is for you. Basic familiarity with statistics, general concepts in machine learning, knowledge of a programming language (Python or R), and some exposure to data science are helpful.

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, Microsoft, and eBay 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.

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

"Turn yourself into a Data Head. You'll become a more valuable employee and make your organization more successful." Thomas H. Davenport, Research Fellow, Author of Competing on Analytics, Big Data @ Work, and The AI Advantage You've heard the hype around data—now get the facts. In Becoming a Data Head: How to Think, Speak, and Understand Data Science, Statistics, and Machine Learning, award-winning data scientists Alex Gutman and Jordan Goldmeier pull back the curtain on data science and give you the language and tools necessary to talk and think critically about it. You'll learn how to: Think statistically and understand the role variation plays in your life and decision making Speak intelligently and ask the right questions about the statistics and results you encounter in the workplace Understand what's really going on with machine learning, text analytics, deep learning, and artificial intelligence Avoid common pitfalls when working with and interpreting data Becoming a Data Head is a complete guide for data science in the workplace: covering everything from the personalities you’ll work with to the math behind the algorithms. The authors have spent years in data trenches and sought to create a fun, approachable, and eminently readable book. Anyone can become a Data Head—an active participant in data science, statistics, and machine learning. Whether you're a business professional, engineer, executive, or aspiring data scientist, this book is for you.

"Turn yourself into a Data Head. You'll become a more valuable employee and make your organization more successful." Thomas H. Davenport, Research Fellow, Author of Competing on Analytics, Big Data @ Work, and The AI Advantage You’ve heard the hype around data—now get the facts. In Becoming a Data Head: How to Think, Speak, and Understand Data Science, Statistics, and Machine Learning, award-winning data scientists Alex Gutman and Jordan Goldmeier pull back the curtain on data science and give you the language and tools necessary to talk and think critically about it. You’ll learn how to: Think statistically and understand the role variation plays in your life and decision making Speak intelligently and ask the right questions about the statistics and results you encounter in the workplace Understand what’s really going on with machine learning, text analytics, deep learning, and artificial intelligence Avoid common pitfalls when working with and interpreting data Becoming a Data Head is a complete guide for data science in the workplace: covering everything from the personalities you’ll work with to the math behind the algorithms. The authors have spent years in data trenches and sought to create a fun, approachable, and eminently readable book. Anyone can become a Data Head—an active participant in data science, statistics, and machine learning. Whether you’re a business professional, engineer, executive, or aspiring data scientist, this book is for you.

Data Scientists at Work is a collection of interviews with sixteen of the world's most influential and innovative data scientists from across the spectrum of this hot new profession. "Data scientist is the sexiest job in the 21st century," according to the Harvard Business Review. By 2018, the United States will experience a shortage of 190,000 skilled data scientists, according to a McKinsey report. Through incisive in-depth interviews, this book mines the what, how, and why of the practice of data science from the stories, ideas, shop talk, and forecasts of its preeminent practitioners across diverse industries: social network (Yann LeCun, Facebook); professional network (Daniel Tunkelang, LinkedIn); venture capital (Roger Ehrenberg, IA Ventures); enterprise cloud computing and neuroscience (Eric Jonas, formerly Salesforce.com); newspaper and media (Chris Wiggins, The New York Times); streaming television (Caitlin Smallwood, Netflix); music forecast (Victor Hu, Next Big Sound); strategic intelligence (Amy Heineike, Quid); environmental big data (André Karpištšenko, Planet OS); geospatial marketing intelligence (Jonathan Lenaghan, PlaceIQ); advertising (Claudia Perlich, Dstillery); fashion e-commerce (Anna Smith, Rent the Runway); specialty retail (Erin Shellman, Nordstrom); email marketing (John Foreman, MailChimp); predictive sales intelligence (Kira Radinsky, SalesPredict); and humanitarian nonprofit (Jake Porway, DataKind). The book features a stimulating foreword by Google's Director of Research, Peter Norvig. Each of these data scientists shares how he or she tailors the torrent-taming techniques of big data, data visualization, search, and statistics to specific jobs by dint of ingenuity, imagination, patience, and passion. Data Scientists at Work parts the curtain on the interviewees’ earliest data projects, how they became data scientists, their discoveries and surprises in working with data, their thoughts on the past, present, and future of the profession, their experiences of team collaboration within their organizations, and the insights they have gained as they get their hands dirty refining mountains of raw data into objects of commercial, scientific, and educational value for their organizations and clients.

Summary You are going to need more than technical knowledge to succeed as a data scientist. Build a Career in Data Science teaches you what school leaves out, from how to land your first job to the lifecycle of a data science project, and even how to become a manager. Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About the technology What are the keys to a data scientist’s long-term success? Blending your technical know-how with the right “soft skills” turns out to be a central ingredient of a rewarding career. About the book Build a Career in Data Science is your guide to landing your first data science job and developing into a valued senior employee. By following clear and simple instructions, you’ll learn to craft an amazing resume and ace your interviews. In this demanding, rapidly changing field, it can be challenging to keep projects on track, adapt to company needs, and manage tricky stakeholders. You’ll love the insights on how to handle expectations, deal with failures, and plan your career path in the stories from seasoned data scientists included in the book. What's inside Creating a portfolio of data science projects Assessing and negotiating an offer Leaving gracefully and moving up the ladder Interviews with professional data scientists About the reader For readers who want to begin or advance a data science career. About the author Emily Robinson is a data scientist at Warby Parker. Jacqueline Nolis is a data science consultant and mentor. Table of Contents: PART 1 - GETTING STARTED WITH DATA SCIENCE 1. What is data science? 2. Data science companies 3. Getting the skills 4. Building a portfolio PART 2 - FINDING YOUR DATA SCIENCE JOB 5. The search: Identifying the right job for you 6. The application: Résumés and cover letters 7. The interview: What to expect and how to handle it 8. The offer: Knowing what to accept PART 3 - SETTLING INTO DATA SCIENCE 9. The first months on the job 10. Making an effective analysis 11. Deploying a model into production 12. Working with stakeholders PART 4 - GROWING IN YOUR DATA SCIENCE ROLE 13. When your data science project fails 14. Joining the data science community 15. Leaving your job gracefully 16. Moving up the ladder