Welcome

Dear MEAP Subscribers:

Welcome to the MEAP for Practical Data Science with R, Second Edition!

Our goal when we began Practical Data Science with R was to write the book that we wish we had when we began our data science careers. We are proud of the result, and we are excited to have the opportunity to make our book even better.

Our intent is to present data science from a pragmatic, practice-oriented viewpoint. We concentrate on the process of data science, from the planning stages of a project, through the data collection and exploration, to the modeling, and finally to deployment and the sharing of results.

We present enough of the theory behind the various methods to enable a user to understand when a technique is or is not appropriate, and how to anticipate and diagnose potential problems. We also concentrate on the nitty-gritty of data science, especially cleaning, preparing and wrangling data before modeling.

The book includes free code and data to reproduce almost every analysis and graph in the text (and there are a lot of them). Please work along with the examples as you read, to get the most out of the book.

We hope you enjoy Practical Data Science with R, Second Edition. We look forward to hearing from you on the forums.

Warm regards,

—Nina Zumel

—John Mount