Big data is flooding the business world. And we need a new generation of business analysts to make sense of it. A report from McKinsey predicts that the US workforce will be short 1.5 million big data managers and analysts by 2018. MIT Sloan is rising to the challenge with a new Master of Business Analytics Program, launched in 2016.

We speak with Dimitris Bertsimas, Professor of Management, and Director of the new MBAn program at MIT Sloan.Plus, we speak with MIT Sloan alum Ali Almossawi. His business school experience set him on a career path in data visualization; he now works for Apple. His new book, “Bad Choices,” explains computer algorithms to a wide audience.

Learn how to write object-oriented programs in R and how to construct classes and class hierarchies in the three object-oriented systems available in R. This book gives an introduction to object-oriented programming in the R programming language and shows you how to use and apply R in an object-oriented manner. You will then be able to use this powerful programming style in your own statistical programming projects to write flexible and extendable software. After reading Advanced Object-Oriented Programming in R, you'll come away with a practical project that you can reuse in your own analytics coding endeavors. You'll then be able to visualize your data as objects that have state and then manipulate those objects with polymorphic or generic methods. Your projects will benefit from the high degree of flexibility provided by polymorphism, where the choice of concrete method to execute depends on the type of data being manipulated. What You'll Learn Define and use classes and generic functions using R Work with the R class hierarchies Benefit from implementation reuse Handle operator overloading Apply the S4 and R6 classes Who This Book Is For Experienced programmers and for those with at least some prior experience with R programming language.

Data & Analytics Bi-Weekly Newsletter Cast June 22, 2017

About #Podcast:

FutureOfData podcast is a conversation starter to bring leaders, influencers and lead practitioners to come on show and discuss their journey in creating the data driven future.

Wanna Join? If you or any you know wants to join in, Register your interest @ http://play.analyticsweek.com/guest/

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Keywords: FutureOfData Data Analytics Leadership Podcast Big Data Strategy

We can watch (sort of) what users do on our sites. That's web analytics. We can ask them how they felt about the experience. That's voice of the customer. But, can we (and should we?) actually analyze their emotional reactions? On this episode, Michael and Tim sat down with Dr. Liraz Margalit, Head of Digital Behavioral Research at Clicktale, to bend their brains a bit around that very topic. And, they left the discussion thinking differently about conversion rates, and even realizing that scroll tracking might just have a valuable application! For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.

Develop your digital/online marketing skills and learn web analytics to understand the performance of websites and ad campaigns. Approaches covered will be immediately useful for business or nonprofit organizations. If you are completely new to Google Analytics and you want to learn the basics, this guide will introduce you to the content quickly. Web analytics is critical to online marketers as they seek to track return on investment and optimize their websites. Introduction to Google Analytics covers the basics of Google Analytics, starting with creating a blog, and monitoring the number of people who see the blog posts and where they come from. What You'll Learn Understand basic techniques to generate traffic for a blog or website Review the performance of a website or campaign Set up a Shopify account to track ROI Create and maximize AdWords to track conversion Discover opportunities offered by Google, including the Google Individual Qualification Who This Book Is For Those who need to get up to speed on Google Analytics tools and techniques for business or personal use. This book is also suitable as a student reference.

Organizations are rapidly consuming more data than ever before, and to drive their competitive advantage, they’re demanding interactive visualizations and interactive analyses of that data be embedded in their applications and business processes. This will enable them to make faster and more effective decisions based on data, not guesses. This practical book examines the considerations that software developers, product managers, and vendors need to take into account when making visualization and analytics a seamlessly integrated part of the applications they deliver, as well as the impact of migrating their applications to modern data platforms. Authors Federico Castanedo (Vodafone Group) and Andy Oram (O’Reilly Media) explore the basic requirements for embedding domain expertise with fast, powerful, and interactive visual analytics that will delight and inform customers more than spreadsheets and custom-generated charts. Particular focus is placed on the characteristics of effective visual analytics for big and fast data. Learn the impact of trends driving embedded analytics Review examples of big data applications and their analytics requirements in retail, direct service, cybersecurity, the Internet of Things, and logistics Explore requirements for embedding visual analytics in modern data environments, including collection, storage, retrieval, data models, speed, microservices, parallelism, and interactivity Take a deep dive into the characteristics of effective visual analytics and criteria for evaluating modern embedded analytics tools Use a self-assessment rating chart to determine the value of your organization’s BI in the modern data setting

Statistical Computation for Programmers, Scientists, Quants, Excel Users, and Other Professionals Using the open source R language, you can build powerful statistical models to answer many of your most challenging questions. R has traditionally been difficult for non-statisticians to learn, and most R books assume far too much knowledge to be of help. is the solution. R for Everyone, Second Edition, Drawing on his unsurpassed experience teaching new users, professional data scientist Jared P. Lander has written the perfect tutorial for anyone new to statistical programming and modeling. Organized to make learning easy and intuitive, this guide focuses on the 20 percent of R functionality you'll need to accomplish 80 percent of modern data tasks. Lander's self-contained chapters start with the absolute basics, offering extensive hands-on practice and sample code. You'll download and install R; navigate and use the R environment; master basic program control, data import, manipulation, and visualization; and walk through several essential tests. Then, building on this foundation, you'll construct several complete models, both linear and nonlinear, and use some data mining techniques. After all this you'll make your code reproducible with LaTeX, RMarkdown, and Shiny. By the time you're done, you won't just know how to write R programs, you'll be ready to tackle the statistical problems you care about most. Coverage includes Explore R, RStudio, and R packages Use R for math: variable types, vectors, calling functions, and more Exploit data structures, including data.frames, matrices, and lists Read many different types of data Create attractive, intuitive statistical graphics Write user-defined functions Control program flow with if, ifelse, and complex checks Improve program efficiency with group manipulations Combine and reshape multiple datasets Manipulate strings using R's facilities and regular expressions Create normal, binomial, and Poisson probability distributions Build linear, generalized linear, and nonlinear models Program basic statistics: mean, standard deviation, and t-tests Train machine learning models Assess the quality of models and variable selection Prevent overfitting and perform variable selection, using the Elastic Net and Bayesian methods Analyze univariate and multivariate time series data Group data via K-means and hierarchical clustering Prepare reports, slideshows, and web pages with knitr Display interactive data with RMarkdown and htmlwidgets Implement dashboards with Shiny Build reusable R packages with devtools and Rcpp

Data science teams looking to turn research into useful analytics applications require not only the right tools, but also the right approach if they’re to succeed. With the revised second edition of this hands-on guide, up-and-coming data scientists will learn how to use the Agile Data Science development methodology to build data applications with Python, Apache Spark, Kafka, and other tools. Author Russell Jurney demonstrates how to compose a data platform for building, deploying, and refining analytics applications with Apache Kafka, MongoDB, ElasticSearch, d3.js, scikit-learn, and Apache Airflow. You’ll learn an iterative approach that lets you quickly change the kind of analysis you’re doing, depending on what the data is telling you. Publish data science work as a web application, and affect meaningful change in your organization. Build value from your data in a series of agile sprints, using the data-value pyramid Extract features for statistical models from a single dataset Visualize data with charts, and expose different aspects through interactive reports Use historical data to predict the future via classification and regression Translate predictions into actions Get feedback from users after each sprint to keep your project on track

In the second edition of this practical book, four Cloudera data scientists present a set of self-contained patterns for performing large-scale data analysis with Spark. The authors bring Spark, statistical methods, and real-world data sets together to teach you how to approach analytics problems by example. Updated for Spark 2.1, this edition acts as an introduction to these techniques and other best practices in Spark programming. You’ll start with an introduction to Spark and its ecosystem, and then dive into patterns that apply common techniques—including classification, clustering, collaborative filtering, and anomaly detection—to fields such as genomics, security, and finance. If you have an entry-level understanding of machine learning and statistics, and you program in Java, Python, or Scala, you’ll find the book’s patterns useful for working on your own data applications. With this book, you will: Familiarize yourself with the Spark programming model Become comfortable within the Spark ecosystem Learn general approaches in data science Examine complete implementations that analyze large public data sets Discover which machine learning tools make sense for particular problems Acquire code that can be adapted to many uses

Rapid technology change is impacting organizations large and small. Mobile and Cloud computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), and “Big Data” are driving forces in organizational digital transformation. Decision support and analytics are available to many people in a business or organization. Business professionals need to learn about and understand computerized decision support for organizations to succeed. This text is targeted to busy managers and students who need to grasp the basics of computerized decision support, including: What is analytics? What is a decision support system? What is “Big Data”? What are “Big Data” business use cases? Overall, it addresses 61 fundamental questions. In a short period of time, readers can “get up to speed” on decision support, analytics, and business intelligence. The book then provides a quick reference to important recurring questions.

Data & Analytics Bi-Weekly Newsletter Cast June 8, 2017

About #Podcast:

FutureOfData podcast is a conversation starter to bring leaders, influencers and lead practitioners to come on show and discuss their journey in creating the data driven future.

Wanna Join? If you or any you know wants to join in, Register your interest @ http://play.analyticsweek.com/guest/

Want to sponsor? Email us @ [email protected]

Keywords: FutureOfData Data Analytics Leadership Podcast Big Data Strategy

Back in the day, we explained the difference between a visitor, a visit, and a pageview to stakeholders using an analogy of a person walking into a physical store. Now, digital channels are dominating, and physical stores are struggling...which is an opportunity to apply what we've learned about behavioral analysis on the web to in-(REAL)-store consumer behavior. Gary Angel from Digital Mortar (@digitalmortar) returned to the show (our first ever repeat guest!) to walk us through the many, many similarities, as well as to explain some of the unique challenges and opportunities of in-store analytics. For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.

Learn how today’s businesses can transform themselves by leveraging real-time data and advanced machine learning analytics. This book provides prescriptive guidance for architects and developers on the design and development of modern Internet of Things (IoT) and Advanced Analytics solutions. In addition, Business in Real-Time Using Azure IoT and Cortana Intelligence Suite offers patterns and practices for those looking to engage their customers and partners through Software-as-a-Service solutions that work on any device. Whether you're working in Health & Life Sciences, Manufacturing, Retail, Smart Cities and Buildings or Process Control, there exists a common platform from which you can create your targeted vertical solutions. Business in Real-Time Using Azure IoT and Cortana Intelligence Suite uses a reference architecture as a road map. Building on Azure’s PaaS services, you'll see how a solution architecture unfolds that demonstrates a complete end-to-end IoT and Advanced Analytics scenario. What You'll Learn: Automate your software product life cycle using PowerShell, Azure Resource Manager Templates, and Visual Studio Team Services Implement smart devices using Node.JS and C# Use Azure Streaming Analytics to ingest millions of events Provide both "Hot" and "Cold" path outputs for real-time alerts, data transformations, and aggregation analytics Implement batch processing using Azure Data Factory Create a new form of Actionable Intelligence (AI) to drive mission critical business processes Provide rich Data Visualizations across a wide variety of mobile and web devices Who This Book is For: Solution Architects, Software Developers, Data Architects, Data Scientists, and CIO/CTA Technical Leadership Professionals

Discover how to harness the power of Apache Spark 2.x for your Big Data processing projects. In this book, you will explore over 70 cloud-ready recipes that will guide you to perform distributed data analytics, structured streaming, machine learning, and much more. What this Book will help me do Effectively install and configure Apache Spark with various cluster managers and platforms. Set up and utilize development environments tailored for Spark applications. Operate on schema-aware data using RDDs, DataFrames, and Datasets. Perform real-time streaming analytics with sources such as Apache Kafka. Leverage MLlib for supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and recommendation systems. Author(s) None Yadav is a seasoned data engineer with a deep understanding of Big Data tools and technologies, particularly Apache Spark. With years of experience in the field of distributed computing and data analysis, Yadav brings practical insights and techniques to enrich the learning experience of readers. Who is it for? This book is ideal for data engineers, data scientists, and Big Data professionals who are keen to enhance their Apache Spark 2.x skills. If you're working with distributed processing and want to solve complex data challenges, this book addresses practical problems. Note that a basic understanding of Scala is recommended to get the most out of this resource.

Explore the intricacies of using R for social media analytics with 'Learning Social Media Analytics with R'. This comprehensive guide introduces readers to tools and techniques to extract, analyze, and visualize data from popular platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Gain insights into advanced methods such as sentiment analysis, topic modeling, and social network analysis. What this Book will help me do Master the art of leveraging R to retrieve, process, and clean data from major social media platforms. Use actionable insights from sentiment analysis and topic modeling to improve decision-making processes. Develop an understanding of social network structures by analyzing community connections and user interactions. Create impactful data visualizations that showcase trends and insights effectively using the R ecosystem. Integrate advanced R packages such as ggplot2, dplyr, and caret to streamline data analysis workflows. Author(s) The authors of this book, None Sarkar, Karthik Ganapathy, Raghav Bali, and None Sharma, are experts in data science and R programming with extensive experience in the industry. They bring a passion for teaching and a clear, step-by-step methodology to help learners grasp complex concepts. Who is it for? This book is ideal for data scientists, analysts, IT professionals, and social media marketers who aim to gain actionable insights from social data. Whether you're a beginner or have some experience with R, this book is highly approachable and beneficial. Readers will find practical examples and comprehensive tutorials tailored for their level of expertise.

Data-based algorithms are personalizing medicine. A family history with diabetes led MIT Sloan professor Dimitris Bertsimas to make breakthroughs in treatment. We spoke with Dimitris about why he works on diabetes, and how he’s using his expertise in data analytics to help.

Data & Analytics Bi-Weekly Newsletter Cast May 25, 2017

About #Podcast:

FutureOfData podcast is a conversation starter to bring leaders, influencers and lead practitioners to come on show and discuss their journey in creating the data driven future.

Wanna Join? If you or any you know wants to join in, Register your interest @ http://play.analyticsweek.com/guest/

Want to sponsor? Email us @ [email protected]

Keywords: FutureOfData Data Analytics Leadership Podcast Big Data Strategy

Change. It's scary. It's exhilarating. It's a song by Churchill. Sometimes, be it due to your manager, due to a corporate acquisition, or due to a job change, you just wind up with a voice in your head belting out, "You want me to change, change, change!" In this episode, Nancy Koons from Team Demystified joins us to dive into our collective histories when it comes to switching analytics tools -- where we stumbled, where we succeeded, and how we've come to approach the ever shifting landscape of analytics tools. For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.  

In this session, Nathaniel discussed how NFPA uses data to empower fire stations worldwide with data-driven insights. We discussed the future of fire in this tech-driven world.

Timeline: 0:29 Nathaniel's journey. 3:50 What's NFPA? 6:12 Nathaniel's role in NFPA. 8:50 Nathaniel's book. 12:21 The data science team at NFPA. 15:01 Working with the government. 18:50 Interesting use cases of NFPA. 25:49 Fining tuning the data model at NFPA. 28:11 NFPA alliance with the Insurance industry. 31:33 Recruiting an idea concept or tool. 33:16 How to approach NFPA? 36:03 Nathaniel's role: in facing or outfacing? 40:41 Suggestions for Non-profits to build a data science practice. 43:49 Putting together a data science team. 46:34 Predicting the fire outcome. 48:11 Closing remarks.

Podcast link: https://futureofdata.org/futureofdata-nathaniel-lin-chief-data-scientist-nfpa/

Bio- Nathaniel Lin has an extensive background in business and marketing analytics with strategic roles in both start-ups and Fortune 500 companies. He offers the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) agency and client perspective gleaned from his work at Fidelity Investments, OgilvyOne, Aspen Marketing, and IBM Worldwide. During his tenure with IBM Asia Pacific, he also built and led a marketing analytics group that won a DMA/NCDM Gold Award in B2B Marketing.

Lin served as an adjunct professor of business analytics at Boston College and Georgia Tech College of Management. He is also the founder of two LinkedIn groups related to big data analytics and is the 2014 author of Applied Business Analytics – Integrating Business Process, Big Data, and Advanced Analytics. Lin has an MBA in Management of Technology/Sloan Fellows from MIT Sloan School of Management and earned both a Ph.D. In Environmental Engineering and an Honors B.S from Birmingham University in England.

Founded in 1896, NFPA is a global, nonprofit organization devoted to eliminating death, injury, property, and economic loss due to fire, electrical and related hazards. The association delivers information and knowledge through more than 300 consensus codes and standards, research, training, education, outreach, and advocacy; and partner with others who share an interest in furthering the NFPA mission. For more information, visit www.nfpa.org.

The podcast is sponsored by: TAO.ai(https://tao.ai), Artificial Intelligence Driven Career Coach

About #Podcast:

FutureOfData podcast is a conversation starter to bring leaders, influencers, and lead practitioners to discuss their journey to create the data-driven future.

Wanna Join? If you or any you know wants to join in, Register your interest @ http://play.analyticsweek.com/guest/

Want to sponsor? Email us @ [email protected]

Keywords:

FutureOfData #DataAnalytics #Leadership #Podcast #BigData #Strategy

Over the past decade, data science has come out of the back office to become a force of change across the entire organization. At the forefront of this change is the open data science movement that advocates the use of open source tools in a powerful, connected ecosystem. This report explores how open data science can help your organization break free from the shackles of proprietary tools, embrace a more open and collaborative work style, and unleash new intelligent applications quickly. Authors Michele Chambers and Christine Doig explain how open source tools have helped bring about many facets of the data science evolution, including collaboration, self-service, and deployment. But you’ll discover that open data science is about more than tools; it’s about a new way of working as an organization. Learn how data science—particularly open data science—has become part of everyday business Understand how open data science engages people from other disciplines, not just statisticians Examine tools and practices that enable data science to be open across technical, operational, and organizational aspects Learn benefits of open data science, including rich resources, agility, transparency, and collective intelligence Explore case studies that demonstrate different ways to implement open data science Discover how open data science can help you break down department barriers and make bold market moves Michele Chambers, Chief Marketing Officer and VP Products at Continuum Analytics, is an entrepreneurial executive with over 25 years of industry experience. Prior to Continuum Analytics, Michele held executive leadership roles at several database and analytic companies, including Netezza, IBM, Revolution Analytics, MemSQL, and RapidMiner. Christine Doig is a senior data scientist at Continuum Analytics, where she's worked on several projects, including MEMEX, a DARPA-funded open data science project to help stop human trafficking. She has 5+ years of experience in analytics, operations research, and machine learning in a variety of industries.