I recently finished reading The Art of Data Science by Roger Peng & Elizabeth Matsui. Roger, together with Jeff Leek, writes the Simply Statistics blog and he works at JHU with Elizabeth.
The aim of the book is to give a guide to data analysis. It is not meant as a comprehensive data analysis “how to”, nor is it a manual for statistics or programming. Instead it is a high-level guide: how to think about data analysis and how to go about doing it. This makes it an interesting read for anyone working with data.
I think anyone who reads the Simply Statistics blog or who has read the piece Roger and Jeff wrote for Science, will be familiar with a lot of the content in here. At the beginning of the book, I didn’t feel like I learned too much. However, I can see that the “converted” are maybe not the target audience here. Towards the end of the book, the authors walk through a few examples of how to analyse some data focussing on the question in mind, how to refine it and then how to start the analysis. This is the most useful aspect of the book in my opinion, to see the approach to data analysis working in practice. The authors sum up the book early on by comparing it to books about songwriting. I admit to rolling my eyes at this comparison (data analysis as an artform…), but actually it is a good analogy. I think many people who work with data know how to do it, in the way that people who write songs know how to do it, although they probably have not had a formal course in the techniques that are being used. Equally reading a guidebook on songwriting will not make you a great songwriter. A book can only get you so far, intuition and invention are required and the same applies to data science.
The book was published via Lean Pub who have an interesting model where you pay a recommended price (or more!) but if you don’t have the money, you can pay less. Also, you can see what fraction goes to the author(s). The books can be updated continually as typos or code updates are fixed. Roger and the Simply Stats people have put out a few books via this publisher. These books on R, programming, statistics and data science all look good and it seems more books are coming soon.
On a personal note: In 2014, I decided to try and read one book per month. I managed it, but in 2015, I am struggling. It is now November and this book is the 7th I’ve read this year. It was published in September but it took me until now to finish it. Too much going on…
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My Blank Pages is a track by Velvet Crush. This is an occasional series of book reviews.