Data Analysis with Open Source Tools at Dominant Systems Book Store

These days it seems like everyone is collecting data. But all of that data is just raw information -- to make that information meaningful, it has to be organized, filtered, and analyzed. Anyone can apply data analysis tools and get results, but without the right approach those results may be useless.

Author Philipp Janert teaches you how to think about data: how to effectively approach data analysis problems, and how to extract all of the available information from your data. Janert covers univariate data, data in multiple dimensions, time series data, graphical techniques, data mining, machine learning, and many other topics. He also reveals how seat-of-the-pants knowledge can lead you to the best approach right from the start, and how to assess results to determine if they're meaningful.

Customer Reviews & Comments
Lucid, learned, and full of insights--a great book on a difficult subject. When I pre-ordered this title, I expected it to be more cookbook-oriented. There are certainly cookbook aspects to it, but it goes way beyond that. For one, it's deep: Janert gives you solutions, sure, but you also get considerable background to go with them. I particularly like chapter 9's sagacious treatment of probability models, especially the section on power law distributions. For another, it's comprehensive--there is a lot of material here, and it's delivered with discipline and care. You can tell that Janert really pushed himself (maybe with a bit of help from his editor) when writing this book. Finally, this book has heart. Data analysis is a means to an end (albeit a wonderful, fascinating one), and the author does his best to ensure that we the reader keep the objective in mind--to inform and enlighten--all the while ensuring that we know enough to pick the right tool for the job. Chapter 16 is another stand-out, and I especially appreciated Janert's distinction here between operational and representative reports and his point about the former: good design emphasizes the content. That's a bit of Tufte-esque advice that we would all do well to remember.

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