Preface

Data Science is a vast field of study. There is so much to learn about and, every day, more and more is added to this pile. It is fascinating, for sure, the way we can analyze data and extract insights that will serve as a base for better decisions. The big companies have learned that data is what can take them to the next level of business achievement and are leading the way by building strong data science teams.

However, just data by itself is not the answer. It is like crude oil: out of it, we can make plenty of things, but just that black liquid from the ground won’t serve us very well. So, raw data is something, but when we clean, transform, and analyze it, we are transforming data into information, and that brings us the power to make better decisions.

In this book, we will go over many aspects of data wrangling, where we will learn how to transform data into knowledge for our business. Our chosen programming language is R, an amazing piece of software that was initially created as a statistical program but became much more than that. If we know what we need to achieve, getting there is just a matter of finding the right tools. Many of those tools are in this book.