Chapter 1. From Data to Decisions – Getting Started with Analytic Applications

From quarterly financial projections to customer surveys, analytics help businesses to make decisions and plan for the future. While data visualizations such as pie charts and trend lines using spreadsheet programs have been used for decades, recent years have seen a growth in both the volume and diversity of data sources available to the business analyst and the sophistication of tools used to interpret this information.

The rapid growth of the Internet, through e-commerce and social media platforms, has generated a wealth of data, which is available faster than ever before for analysis. Photographs, search queries, and online forum posts are all examples of unstructured ...

Get Mastering Predictive Analytics with Python now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.