Author Description

Data analysis is a difficult process largely because few people can describe exactly how to do it. It's not that there aren't any people doing data analysis on a regular basis. It's that the process by which we state a question, explore data, conduct formal modeling, interpret results, and communicate findings, is a difficult process to generalize and abstract. Fundamentally, data analysis is an art. It is not yet something that we can easily automate. Data analysts have many tools at their disposal, from linear regression to classification trees to random forests, and these tools have all been carefully implemented on computers. But ultimately, it takes a data analyst?a person?to find a way to assemble all of the tools and apply them to data to answer a question of interest to people. This book writes down the process of data a.