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What is bad data? Some people consider it a technical phenomenon, like missing values or malformed records, but bad data includes a lot more. In this handbook, data expert Q. Ethan McCallum has gathered 19 colleagues from every corner of the data arena to reveal how they’ve recovered from nasty data problems. From cranky storage to poor representation to misguided policy, there are many paths to bad data. Bottom line? Bad data is data that gets in the way. This book explains effective ways to get around it. Among the many topics covered, you’ll discover how to: Test drive your data to see if it’s ready for analysis Work spreadsheet data into a usable form Handle encoding problems that lurk in text data Develop a successful web-scraping effort Use NLP tools to reveal the real sentiment of online reviews Address cloud computing issues that can impact your analysis effort Avoid policies that create data analysis roadblocks Take a systematic approach to data quality analysis
Highlights the pitfalls of data analysis and emphasizes the importance of using the appropriate metrics before making key decisions. Big data is often touted as the key to understanding almost every aspect of contemporary life. This critique of "information hubris" shows that even more important than data is finding the right metrics to evaluate it. The author, an expert in environmental design and city planning, examines the many ways in which we measure ourselves and our world. He dissects the metrics we apply to health, worker productivity, our children's education, the quality of our environment, the effectiveness of leaders, the dynamics of the economy, and the overall well-being of the planet. Among the areas where the wrong metrics have led to poor outcomes, he cites the fee-for-service model of health care, corporate cultures that emphasize time spent on the job while overlooking key productivity measures, overreliance on standardized testing in education to the detriment of authentic learning, and a blinkered focus on carbon emissions, which underestimates the impact of industrial damage to our natural world. He also examines various communities and systems that have achieved better outcomes by adjusting the ways in which they measure data. The best results are attained by those that have learned not only what to measure and how to measure it, but what it all means. By highlighting the pitfalls inherent in data analysis, this illuminating book reminds us that not everything that can be counted really counts.
Not all statistics are created equal. Take a look behind the scenes and you'll discover that even most official data isn't the solid bedrock we think it is. It's patchy, inconsistent, full of guesswork and uncertainty - and it's playing an ever-bigger role in policy decisions. BAD DATA takes the reader on that behind-the-scenes journey, guided by House of Commons Library statistician Georgina Sturge. Revealing the secrets of a world that is usually closed off, it will show how governments of the past and present have been led astray by bad data and explain why it is so hard to count and measure things, and how we could better handle these problems. Discover how one Hungarian businessman's bright idea caused half a million people to go missing from UK migration statistics. Find out why it's possible for two politicians to disagree over whether poverty has gone up or down, using the same official numbers, and for both to be right at the same time. And hear about how policies like ID cards, super-casinos and stopping ex-convicts from reoffending failed to live up to their promise because they were based on shaky data.
Big data is a relative term describing a situation where the volume, velocity and variety of data exceed an organization's storage or compute capacity for accurate and timely decision making . Big data is not a single technology but a combination of old and new technologies that helps companies gain actionable insight. Therefore, big data is the capability to manage a huge volume of disparate data, at the right speed, and within the right time frame to allow real-time analysis and reaction. As we note earlier in this chapter, big data is typically broken down by three characteristics: Volume: How much data Velocity: How fast that data is processed Variety: The various types of data Although it's convenient to simplify big data into the three Vs, it can be misleading and overly simplistic. For example, you may be managing a relatively small amount of very disparate, complex data or you may be processing a huge volume of very simple data. That simple data may be all structured or all unstructured. Even more important is the fourth V: veracity. How accurate is that data in predicting business value? Do the results of a big data analysis actually make sense? Determining relevant data is key to delivering value from massive amounts of data. However, big data is defined less by volume - which is a constantly moving target - than by its ever-increasing variety, velocity, variability and complexity
Effective visualization is the best way to communicate information from the increasingly large and complex datasets in the natural and social sciences. But with the increasing power of visualization software today, scientists, engineers, and business analysts often have to navigate a bewildering array of visualization choices and options. This practical book takes you through many commonly encountered visualization problems, and it provides guidelines on how to turn large datasets into clear and compelling figures. What visualization type is best for the story you want to tell? How do you make informative figures that are visually pleasing? Author Claus O. Wilke teaches you the elements most critical to successful data visualization. Explore the basic concepts of color as a tool to highlight, distinguish, or represent a value Understand the importance of redundant coding to ensure you provide key information in multiple ways Use the book’s visualizations directory, a graphical guide to commonly used types of data visualizations Get extensive examples of good and bad figures Learn how to use figures in a document or report and how employ them effectively to tell a compelling story
Crime research has grown substantially over the past decade, with a rise in evidence-informed approaches to criminal justice, statistics-driven decision-making and predictive analytics. The fuel that has driven this growth is data – and one of its most pressing challenges is the lack of research on the use and interpretation of data sources. This accessible, engaging book closes that gap for researchers, practitioners and students. International researchers and crime analysts discuss the strengths, perils and opportunities of the data sources and tools now available and their best use in informing sound public policy and criminal justice practice.
Keep your head held high even on the bad days with 70 mindful self-care strategies to find happiness. In a time when social media encourages us to constantly highlight how great we’re doing and how #Blessed life is, there seems to be little room for the inevitable truth: in every life, there are days that are NOT great. Yet decades in the self-help world have taught Eveline Helmink—editor-in-chief of Happinez magazine and a self-titled cheerleader for failure and discomfort—that true emotional growth comes from realizing that it’s often on our worst days when we learn the most about what empowers, strengthens, and revitalizes us—and yes, brings us happiness. In The Handbook for Bad Days, Helmink teaches you how to take advantage of bad days as moments for self-discovery and emotional understanding. Her compassionate, no-bullshit approach encourages you to detox from the social media world and rethink your coping strategies, exploring topics such as, -The benefits of a good cry -Why, sometimes, it’s okay to give up -Why a fuzzy pink cardigan and some Celine Dion is just as good as a Sanskrit mantra The Handbook for Bad Days is the ultimate guide for anyone who strives to be present, not perfect. Perfect for fans of Glennon Doyle, Elizabeth Lesser, and Krista Tippet, The Handbook for Bad Days is a call to face our worst days with courage and intentionality.
This book presents a perspective of network analysis as a tool to find and quantify significant structures in the interaction patterns between different types of entities. Moreover, network analysis provides the basic means to relate these structures to properties of the entities. It has proven itself to be useful for the analysis of biological and social networks, but also for networks describing complex systems in economy, psychology, geography, and various other fields. Today, network analysis packages in the open-source platform R and other open-source software projects enable scientists from all fields to quickly apply network analytic methods to their data sets. Altogether, these applications offer such a wealth of network analytic methods that it can be overwhelming for someone just entering this field. This book provides a road map through this jungle of network analytic methods, offers advice on how to pick the best method for a given network analytic project, and how to avoid common pitfalls. It introduces the methods which are most often used to analyze complex networks, e.g., different global network measures, types of random graph models, centrality indices, and networks motifs. In addition to introducing these methods, the central focus is on network analysis literacy – the competence to decide when to use which of these methods for which type of question. Furthermore, the book intends to increase the reader's competence to read original literature on network analysis by providing a glossary and intensive translation of formal notation and mathematical symbols in everyday speech. Different aspects of network analysis literacy – understanding formal definitions, programming tasks, or the analysis of structural measures and their interpretation – are deepened in various exercises with provided solutions. This text is an excellent, if not the best starting point for all scientists who want to harness the power of network analysis for their field of expertise.
Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques, Third Edition, offers a thorough grounding in machine learning concepts as well as practical advice on applying machine learning tools and techniques in real-world data mining situations. This highly anticipated third edition of the most acclaimed work on data mining and machine learning will teach you everything you need to know about preparing inputs, interpreting outputs, evaluating results, and the algorithmic methods at the heart of successful data mining. Thorough updates reflect the technical changes and modernizations that have taken place in the field since the last edition, including new material on Data Transformations, Ensemble Learning, Massive Data Sets, Multi-instance Learning, plus a new version of the popular Weka machine learning software developed by the authors. Witten, Frank, and Hall include both tried-and-true techniques of today as well as methods at the leading edge of contemporary research. The book is targeted at information systems practitioners, programmers, consultants, developers, information technology managers, specification writers, data analysts, data modelers, database R&D professionals, data warehouse engineers, data mining professionals. The book will also be useful for professors and students of upper-level undergraduate and graduate-level data mining and machine learning courses who want to incorporate data mining as part of their data management knowledge base and expertise. Provides a thorough grounding in machine learning concepts as well as practical advice on applying the tools and techniques to your data mining projects Offers concrete tips and techniques for performance improvement that work by transforming the input or output in machine learning methods Includes downloadable Weka software toolkit, a collection of machine learning algorithms for data mining tasks—in an updated, interactive interface. Algorithms in toolkit cover: data pre-processing, classification, regression, clustering, association rules, visualization