Business Analytics Continuum: Descriptive, Diagnostic, Predictive, Prescriptive

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Think of “continuum” as something you start and you never stop improving upon. In my mind, Business Analytics Continuum is continuous investment of resources to take business analytics capabilities to next level. So what are these levels? 

Here are the visual representation of the concept:

business analytics continuum

What are the must-know software skills for a career in data analytics after an MBA?

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SQL, Excel & Tableau-like tools are good enough to start. Then add something like R eventually. And then there are tools that are specific to the industry – example: Google Analytics for the tech industry.

Other than that, you should know what do with these tools. You need to know following concepts and continuously build upon that as the industry use-cases and needs evolve:

  1. Spreadsheet modeling
  2. Forecasting
  3. Customer Segmentation
  4. Root cause Analysis
  5. Data Visualization and Dash-boarding
  6. Customer Lifetime value
  7. A/B testing
  8. Web Analytics

VIEW QUESTION ON QUORA

[VIDEO] Microsoft’s vision for “Advanced analytics” (presented at #sqlpass summit 2015)

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Presented at #sqlpass summit 2015.

Data -> Insights -> ?

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I was at the HP Big data conference last week and I heard something during the keynote that’s worth sharing with you.

As Data & Analytics professionals, we spend a lot of our time on finding insights, trends & patterns out of the data but the keynote speaker (Ken Rudin, Facebook) encouraged everyone to take that a step further = Think about Driving impact based on the insights. It’s simple yet a powerful idea! Over past few months, I have started working closely with decision makers and helping drive impact vs just “handing-off” insights.

I hope that helps! Just wanted to share that with you. What do you think?

-Paras

Book Review: R in a Nutshell

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R is a popular tool among data scientists because it’s just like a Swiss Army knife (or may be more!) for them!

R Language Data scientist swiss army knife tool

Analogy credit: Tapping the Data Deluge with R by Jeffrey Breen

Sometime back I worked on a research project that involved writing some R code – we were searching for tools ways to pull data from multiple social networks, perform text analysis and create effective data visualizations. R seemed like a great tool & so I was searching for a book/guides that teaches me fundamentals I needed to know to get few R related things done. One of the books that I used often during the research project was “R in nutshell”. I didn’t read it cover-to-cover but it was a great reference book for me. I used to read guides online/other-books and then I used to combine information from this book to get stuff done. The section I liked the most was on Data visualization which included some great code snippets to create effective data visualization using ggplot2 library. I used to take code snippets from this book & apply it on data-sets that I had.

text analysis sentiment

Fun stuff!

Also, I liked it that the book has some end-to-end examples that cover the entire life cycle of data analysis/statistical-analysis.

Summary:

I recommend this book as a “reference” for someone who started working with R.

Note:

I received a copy of this book as part of OREILLY’s Blogger program. Thanks OREILLY! If you are a blogger, you should check out that program!

Resource: 12 recorded sessions from the 24hop business analytics edition are online! #passbac #msbi

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Recently, PASS hosted a 24hop business analytics event:

And now, the 12 one hour sessions ranging from data visualization, predictive analytics to Big Data are online for you to watch! They also serve as “Trailer” for what you can expect at the PASS Business Analytics conference!

Here’s the URL: http://passbaconference.com/Sessions/SneakPeeks.aspx

And I was following some of these sessions live on the event day – and I can tell you, these sessions are great resources!

Also, I participated in the twitter contest (by Microsoft BI) that was happening along w/ the event – and this is what I got for my win!

24 hop twitter contest prize

hoodie w/ embedded earphones!

That’s about it for this post. Enjoy the recordings!

Quick Post: Uploading Local Data to Hadoop file system using Hadoop Command Line

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This is a Quick Post, Just want to share a command to upload local data to HDFS using Hadoop Command Line.

The command looks like:

> hadoop fs -copyFromLocal input.txt input/SqrtJob/input.txt

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Download PPT: Why Big Data Matters?

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Download Link Here:

SQL Saturday 185 (Trinidad): Why Big Data Matters? by Paras Doshi

(if you need the .ppt version of this talk, please contact me via http://parasdoshi.com/contact/)

 

How to start Analyzing Twitter Data w/ R?

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Over the past few weeks, I have posted notes about Analyzing Twitter Data w/ R, listing them here:

1. Install R & RStudio

2. R code to download twitter data

3. Perform Sentiment Analysis on Twitter Data (in R)

How to load some data to Hadoop on Windows to get started?

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In this post, I want to point out that HDInsight (Hadoop on Windows) comes with a sample datasets (log files) that you can load using the command:

1. Hadoop command Line > Navigate to c:HadoopGettingStarted

2. Execute the following command:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy unrestricted –F importdata.ps1 w3c

import data to hadoop on windows file system

After you have successfully executed the command, you can sample files in /w3c/input folder:

w3c log files iis hadoop on windows

Conclusion: In this post, we saw how to load some data to Hadoop on Windows file system to get started. Your comments are very welcome.

Official Resource: http://gettingstarted.hadooponazure.com/loadingData.html