Advancing Into Analytics

Book excerpt: Data analytics may seem daunting, but if you're familiar with Excel, you have a head start that can help you make the leap into analytics. Advancing into Analytics will lower your learning curve. Author George Mount, founder and CEO of Stringfest Analytics, clearly and gently guides intermediate Excel users to a solid understanding of analytics and the data stack. This book demonstrates key statistical concepts from spreadsheets and pivots your existing knowledge about data manipulation into R and Python programming. With this practical book at your side, you'll learn how to: Explore a dataset for potential research questions to check assumptions and to build hypotheses Make compelling business recommendations using inferential statistics Load, view, and write datasets using R and Python Perform common data wrangling tasks such as sorting, filtering, and aggregating using R and Python Navigate and execute code in Jupyter notebooks Identify, install, and implement the most useful open source packages for your needs And more.