Preface

Today, a lot of organizations are investing in improving their analytics skills and tools. They know that, by analyzing their data, they can improve the performance of their business process and achieve real value from that.

The objective of this book is to introduce you to predictive analytics and data visualization by developing some example applications. We'll use R and Rattle to create the predictive model and Qlik Sense to create a data application that allows business users to explore their data.

We use Rattle and Qlik Sense to avoid learn programming and focus on predictive analytics and data visualizations concepts.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Getting Ready with Predictive Analytics, explains the key concepts of predictive analytics and how to install our learning environments, such as Qlik Sense, R, and Rattle.

Chapter 2, Preparing Your Data, covers the basic characteristics of datasets, how to load a dataset into Rattle, and how to transform it. As data is the basic ingredient of analytics, preparing the data to analyze it is the first step.

Chapter 3, Exploring and Understanding Your Data, introduces you to Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) using Rattle. EDA is a statistical approach to understanding data.

Chapter 4, Creating Your First Qlik Sense Application, discusses how to load a dataset into Qlik Sense, create a data model and basic charts, and explore data using Qlik Sense. Using Exploratory Data Analysis and Rattle to understand our data is a very mathematical approach. Usually, business users prefer a more intuitive approach, such as Qlik Sense

Chapter 5, Clustering and Other Unsupervised Learning Methods, covers machine, supervised, and unsupervised learning but focuses on unsupervised learning We create an example application using K-means, a classic machine learning algorithm. We use Rattle to process the dataset and then we load it into Qlik Sense to present the data to the business user.

Chapter 6, Decision Trees and Other Supervised Learning Methods, focuses on supervised learning. It helps you create an example application using Decision Tree Learning. We use Rattle to process the data and Qlik Sense to communicate with it.

Chapter 7, Model Evaluation, explains how to evaluate the performance of a model. Model evaluation is very useful to improve the performance.

Chapter 8, Visualizations, Data Applications, Dashboards, and Data Storytelling, focuses on data visualization and data storytelling using Qlik Sense.

Chapter 9, Developing a Complete Application, explains how to create a complete application. It covers how to explore the data, create a predictive model, and create a data application.

What you need for this book

To install our learning environment and complete the examples, you need a 64-bit computer:

• OS: Windows 7, Windows 8, or 8.1
• Processor: Intel Core2 Duo or higher
• Memory: 4 GB or more
• .NET Framework: 4.0
• Security: Local admin privileges to install R, Rattle, and Qlik Sense.

Who this book is for

If you are a business analyst who wants to understand how to improve your data analysis and how to apply predictive analytics, then this book is ideal for you. This book assumes that you to have some basic knowledge of QlikView, but no knowledge of implementing predictive analysis with QlikView. It would also be helpful to be familiar with the basic concepts of statistics and a spreadsheet editor, such as Excel.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "After you have downloaded it, type library(rattle) and R will load the Rattle package into memory, and you will be able to use it."

A block of code is set as follows:

If Purpose = 'Education' AND Sex = 'male' AND Age > 25 Then No Default
If Purpose = 'Education' AND Sex = 'male' AND Age < 25 Then Yes Default

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Don't be afraid, we will use two software tools Rattle and Qlik Sense Desktop in order to avoid complex code."

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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