Advancing into Analytics

Chapter 14. Conclusion and Next Steps

In the Preface, I stated the following learning objective:

By the end of this book, you should be able to conduct exploratory data analysis and hypothesis testing using a programming language.

I sincerely hope you feel this objective has been met, and that you are confident to advance into further areas of analytics. To end this leg of your analytics journey, I’d like to share some topics to help round out and expand upon what you now know.

Further Slices of the Stack

Chapter 5 covered four major categories of software applications used in data analytics: spreadsheets, programming languages, databases, and BI tools. Because of our focus on the statistically based elements of analytics, we emphasized the first two slices of the stack. Refer back to that chapter on ideas for how the other slices tie in, and what to learn about them.

Research Design and Business Experiments

You learned in Chapter 3 that sound data analysis can only follow from sound data collection: as the saying goes, “garbage in, garbage out.” In this book, we’ve assumed our data was collected accurately, was the right data for our analysis, and contained a representative sample. And we’ve been working with well-known datasets often taken from peer-reviewed research, so this is a safe assumption.

But often you can’t be so sure about your data; you may responsible for collecting and analyzing it. It’s worth learning more, then, about research design and methods. This field ...