May 2020
Beginner to intermediate
242 pages
7h 17m
English
Content preview from Analytical Skills for AI and Data Science
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 2. Intro to Analytical Thinking
In the last chapter, I defined analytical thinking as the ability to translate business problems into prescriptive solutions. There is a lot to unpack from this definition, and this will be our task in this chapter.
To really understand the power of prescriptive solutions, I will start by precisely defining each of the three stages present in any analysis of business decisions: these are the descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive steps we have already mentioned in Chapter 1.
Since one crucial skill in our analytical toolbox will be formulating the right business questions from the outset, I will provide an initial glimpse into this topic. Spoiler alert: we only care about business questions that entail business decisions. We will then dissect decisions into levers, consequences, and business results. The link between levers and consequences is intermediated by causation, so I will spend quite a bit of time talking about this topic. Finally, I will talk about the role that uncertainty plays in business decisions. Each of these topics is tied to one skill that will be developed throughout the book.
What Is a Lever?
In the context of this book, “levers” are synonymous with “actions” or “decisions,” so whenever we say that “we want to pull some lever to obtain a business outcome,” this means that we are looking for suitable actions or decisions.
Descriptive, Predictive, and Prescriptive Questions
In Chapter 1, we saw that data maturity ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.