Big Data MBA

Chapter 6Data Science 101

There are many excellent books and courses focused on teaching people how to become a data scientist. Those books and courses provide detailed material and exercises that teach the key capabilities of data science such as statistical analysis, data mining, text mining, SQL programming, and other computing, mathematical, and analytic techniques. That is not the purpose of this chapter.

The purpose of Chapter 6 is to introduce some different analytic algorithms that business users should be aware of and to discuss when it might be most appropriate to use which types of algorithms. You do not need to be a data scientist to understand when and why to apply these analytic algorithms. A more detailed understanding of these different analytic algorithms will help the business users to collaborate with the data science team to uncover those variables and metrics that may be better predictors of business performance.

Data Science Case Study Setup

Data science is a complicated topic that certainly cannot be given justice in a single chapter. So to help grasp some of the data science concepts that are covered in Chapter 6, you are going to create a fictitious company against which you can apply the different analytic algorithms. Hopefully this will make the different data science concepts “come to life.”

Our fictitious company, Fairy-Tale Theme Parks (“The Parks”), has multiple amusement parks across North America and wants to employ big data and data science ...