Data Science

A concise introduction to the emerging field of data science, explaining its evolution, relation to machine learning, current uses, data infrastructure issues, and ethical challenges. The goal of data science is to improve decision making through the analysis of data. Today data science determines the ads we see online, the books and movies that are recommended to us online, which emails are filtered into our spam folders, and even how much we pay for health insurance. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers a concise introduction to the emerging field of data science, explaining its evolution, current uses, data infrastructure issues, and ethical challenges. It has never been easier for organizations to gather, store, and process data. Use of data science is driven by the rise of big data and social media, the development of high-performance computing, and the emergence of such powerful methods for data analysis and modeling as deep learning. Data science encompasses a set of principles, problem definitions, algorithms, and processes for extracting non-obvious and useful patterns from large datasets. It is closely related to the fields of data mining and machine learning, but broader in scope. This book offers a brief history of the field, introduces fundamental data concepts, and describes the stages in a data science project. It considers data infrastructure and the challenges posed by integrating data from multiple sources, introduces the basics of machine learning, and discusses how to link machine learning expertise with real-world problems. The book also reviews ethical and legal issues, developments in data regulation, and computational approaches to preserving privacy. Finally, it considers the future impact of data science and offers principles for success in data science projects.

Learn the basics of Data Science through an easy to understand conceptual framework and immediately practice using RapidMiner platform. Whether you are brand new to data science or working on your tenth project, this book will show you how to analyze data, uncover hidden patterns and relationships to aid important decisions and predictions. Data Science has become an essential tool to extract value from data for any organization that collects, stores and processes data as part of its operations. This book is ideal for business users, data analysts, business analysts, engineers, and analytics professionals and for anyone who works with data. You’ll be able to: Gain the necessary knowledge of different data science techniques to extract value from data. Master the concepts and inner workings of 30 commonly used powerful data science algorithms. Implement step-by-step data science process using using RapidMiner, an open source GUI based data science platform Data Science techniques covered: Exploratory data analysis, Visualization, Decision trees, Rule induction, k-nearest neighbors, Naïve Bayesian classifiers, Artificial neural networks, Deep learning, Support vector machines, Ensemble models, Random forests, Regression, Recommendation engines, Association analysis, K-Means and Density based clustering, Self organizing maps, Text mining, Time series forecasting, Anomaly detection, Feature selection and more...