Web technologies are increasingly relevant to scientists working with data, for both accessing data and creating rich dynamic and interactive displays. The XML and JSON data formats are widely used in Web services, regular Web pages and JavaScript code, and visualization formats such as SVG and KML for Google Earth and Google Maps. In addition, scientists use HTTP and other network protocols to scrape data from Web pages, access REST and SOAP Web Services, and interact with NoSQL databases and text search applications. This book provides a practical hands-on introduction to these technologies, including high-level functions the authors have developed for data scientists. It describes strategies and approaches for extracting data from HTML, XML, and JSON formats and how to programmatically access data from the Web. Along with these general skills, the authors illustrate several applications that are relevant to data scientists, such as reading and writing spreadsheet documents both locally and via Google Docs, creating interactive and dynamic visualizations, displaying spatial-temporal displays with Google Earth, and generating code from descriptions of data structures to read and write data. These topics demonstrate the rich possibilities and opportunities to do new things with these modern technologies. The book contains many examples and case-studies that readers can use directly and adapt to their own work. The authors have focused on the integration of these technologies with the R statistical computing environment. However, the ideas and skills presented here are more general, and statisticians who use other computing environments will also find them relevant to their work. Deborah Nolan is Professor of Statistics at University of California, Berkeley. Duncan Temple Lang is Associate Professor of Statistics at University of California, Davis and has been a member of both the S and R development teams.

Effectively Access, Transform, Manipulate, Visualize, and Reason about Data and ComputationData Science in R: A Case Studies Approach to Computational Reasoning and Problem Solving illustrates the details involved in solving real computational problems encountered in data analysis. It reveals the dynamic and iterative process by which data analysts

As an aspiring data scientist, you appreciate why organizations rely on data for important decisions--whether it's for companies designing websites, cities deciding how to improve services, or scientists discovering how to stop the spread of disease. And you want the skills required to distill a messy pile of data into actionable insights. We call this the data science lifecycle: the process of collecting, wrangling, analyzing, and drawing conclusions from data. Learning Data Science is the first book to cover foundational skills in both programming and statistics that encompass this entire lifecycle. It's aimed at those who wish to become data scientists or who already work with data scientists, and at data analysts who wish to cross the "technical/nontechnical" divide. If you have a basic knowledge of Python programming, you'll learn how to work with data using industry-standard tools like pandas. Refine a question of interest to one that can be studied with data Pursue data collection that may involve text processing, web scraping, etc. Glean valuable insights about data through data cleaning, exploration, and visualization Learn how to use modeling to describe the data Generalize findings beyond the data

Master modern web and network data modeling: both theory and applications. In Web and Network Data Science, a top faculty member of Northwestern University's prestigious analytics program presents the first fully-integrated treatment of both the business and academic elements of web and network modeling for predictive analytics. Some books in this field focus either entirely on business issues (e.g., Google Analytics and SEO); others are strictly academic (covering topics such as sociology, complexity theory, ecology, applied physics, and economics). This text gives today's managers and students what they really need: integrated coverage of concepts, principles, and theory in the context of real-world applications. Building on his pioneering Web Analytics course at Northwestern University, Thomas W. Miller covers usability testing, Web site performance, usage analysis, social media platforms, search engine optimization (SEO), and many other topics. He balances this practical coverage with accessible and up-to-date introductions to both social network analysis and network science, demonstrating how these disciplines can be used to solve real business problems.

This is the eBook of the printed book and may not include any media, website access codes, or print supplements that may come packaged with the bound book. This up-to-the-minute reference will help you master all three facets of sports analytics — and use it to win! Sports Analytics and Data Science is the most accessible and practical guide to sports analytics for everyone who cares about winning and everyone who is interested in data science. You’ll discover how successful sports analytics blends business and sports savvy, modern information technology, and sophisticated modeling techniques. You’ll master the discipline through realistic sports vignettes and intuitive data visualizations–not complex math. Every chapter focuses on one key sports analytics application. Miller guides you through assessing players and teams, predicting scores and making game-day decisions, crafting brands and marketing messages, increasing revenue and profitability, and much more. Step by step, you’ll learn how analysts transform raw data and analytical models into wins: both on the field and in any sports business.

This guide for practicing statisticians, data scientists, and R users and programmers will teach the essentials of preprocessing: data leveraging the R programming language to easily and quickly turn noisy data into usable pieces of information. Data wrangling, which is also commonly referred to as data munging, transformation, manipulation, janitor work, etc., can be a painstakingly laborious process. Roughly 80% of data analysis is spent on cleaning and preparing data; however, being a prerequisite to the rest of the data analysis workflow (visualization, analysis, reporting), it is essential that one become fluent and efficient in data wrangling techniques. This book will guide the user through the data wrangling process via a step-by-step tutorial approach and provide a solid foundation for working with data in R. The author's goal is to teach the user how to easily wrangle data in order to spend more time on understanding the content of the data. By the end of the book, the user will have learned: How to work with different types of data such as numerics, characters, regular expressions, factors, and dates The difference between different data structures and how to create, add additional components to, and subset each data structure How to acquire and parse data from locations previously inaccessible How to develop functions and use loop control structures to reduce code redundancy How to use pipe operators to simplify code and make it more readable How to reshape the layout of data and manipulate, summarize, and join data sets