Jeffrey S. Saltz - Data Science for Business With R

Copyright 2022 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

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Data science has continued to grow in importance within many different organizational contexts. As data science tools improve, a larger and larger number of students will need to possess a basic level of data science skills and knowledge. With this in mind, our goal of creating this book was to provide an easy to understand introductory data science text that provides an intuitive understanding of how to apply data science concepts within a variety of organizational contexts. As such, we've worked to make the book easy to read and to provide students with hands on learning opportunities that will prepare them for the workplace. We chose to use the R programming language, because it is freely available to all students and instructors, it is relatively easy to learn as a first language, the R-Studio development environment is superior to most of the alternatives, and it connects conveniently with common spreadsheet formats.

We've tested the content of this book thoroughly over many semesters with a diverse range of students. In teaching our introductory data science course, we have noticed an increase in the number of business majors taking the course. In response, this book has a specific focus on how to use data science within business contexts. We leverage one business case across the whole book this includes a realistic data set that we use to illustrate a variety of data science techniques. As such, our book will help students gain an appreciation of not only the different strategies that a data scientist can use to get insight in the data, but also allows students to understand the full life cycle of executing a data science project from reading and cleaning data, to exploratory analysis, to using machine learning insights to provide actionable advice to a client or business partner.