Daniel Vaughan - Analytical Skills for AI and Data Science: Building Skills for an Ai-Driven Enterprise

This book is for anyone wanting to create value from machine learning. Ive used parts of the material with business students, data scientists, and business people alike.

The most advanced material deals with decision-making under uncertainty and optimization, so having a background in probability, statistics, or calculus will definitely help. For readers without this background, Ive tried to make the presentation self-contained. On a first pass, you might just skip the technical details and focus on developing an intuition and an understanding of the main messages for each chapter.

• If youre a business person with no interest whatsoever in doing machine learning yourself, this book should at least help redirect the questions you want your data scientists to answer. Business people have great ideas, but they may have difficulty expressing what they want to more technical types. If you want to start using AI in your own line of work, this book will help you formulate and translate the questions so that others can work on the solutions. My hope is that it will also serve as inspiration to solve new problems you didnt think were resolvable.

• If youre a data scientist, this book will provide a holistic view of how you can approach your stakeholders and generate ideas to apply your technical knowledge. In my experience, data scientists become really good at solving predictive problems, but many times have difficulties delivering prescriptive courses of action. The result is that your work doesnt create as much value as you want and expect. If youve felt frustrated because your stakeholders dont understand the relevance of machine learning, this book could help you transform the question youre solving to take it closer to the business.

• If youre neither one of these, the fact that you find the title compelling indicates that you have an interest in AI. Please recall the disclaimer in the previous section: you wont learn to develop AI solutions in this book. My aim is to help you translate business questions into prescriptive solutions using AI as an input.

I wrote this book in a style that is supposed to be readable for very different audiences. I do not expect the reader to have any prior knowledge of probability or statistics, machine learning, economics, or the theory of decision making.

Readers with such backgrounds will find the more technical material introductory, and thats actually great. In my opinion, the key to creating value through these techniques is to focus on the business question and not on the technical details. I hope that by focusing on the use cases you can find many new ways to solve the problems youre facing.