Email the Author
You can use this page to email Roger D. Peng and Elizabeth Matsui about The Art of Data Science.
About the Book
Data analysis is a difficult process largely because few people can describe exactly how to do it. It's not that there aren't any people doing data analysis on a regular basis. It's that the process by which we state a question, explore data, conduct formal modeling, interpret results, and communicate findings, is a difficult process to generalize and abstract. Fundamentally, data analysis is an art. It is not yet something that we can easily automate. Data analysts have many tools at their disposal, from linear regression to classification trees to random forests, and these tools have all been carefully implemented on computers. But ultimately, it takes a data analyst—a person—to find a way to assemble all of the tools and apply them to data to answer a question of interest to people.
This book writes down the process of data analysis with a minimum of technical detail. What we describe is not a specific "formula" for data analysis, but rather is a general process that can be applied in a variety of situations. Through our extensive experience both managing data analysts and conducting our own data analyses, we have carefully observed what produces coherent results and what fails to produce useful insights into data. This book is a distillation of our experience in a format that is applicable to both practitioners and managers in data science.
If you are interested in obtaining a printed copy of this book, you can purchase one at Lulu.
The package containing the lecture videos offers short commentaries on each of the chapters and contains addtional explanatory material for each of the topics. In addition there is some material in the lectures that is not included in the book.
About the Authors
Roger D. Peng is a Professor of Statistics and Data Sciences at the University of Texas, Austin. Previously, he was Professor of Biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. His research focuses on the development of statistical methods for addressing environmental health problems and on developing tools for doing better data analysis. He is the author of the popular book R Programming for Data Science and 10 other books on data science and statistics. He is also the co-creator of the Johns Hopkins Data Science Specialization, the Simply Statistics blog where he writes about statistics for the public, the Not So Standard Deviations podcast with Hilary Parker, and The Effort Report podcast with Elizabeth Matsui. Roger is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and is the recipient of the Mortimer Spiegelman Award from the American Public Health Association, which honors a statistician who has made outstanding contributions to public health. He can be found on Twitter and GitHub at @rdpeng.
Elizabeth Matsui is a Professor of Population Health and Pediatrics at Dell Medical School at UT Austin and an Adjunct Professor of Pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University. She is also a practicing pediatric allergist/immunologist and epidemiologist and directs a research program focused on environmental exposures and lung health. Elizabeth can be found on Twitter @elizabethmatsui.