Data Fluency: Exploring and Describing Data

- [Barton] This is a transformational time in our history, the data revolution has produced some jaw dropping advances in technology, medicine, commerce, and so many other fields. But data doesn't have to be industrial scale to be useful. It turns out that entrepreneurs, startups, and small businesses can get significant insights and jump starts from basic analysis of even small data sets. This is where data fluency comes in. I'm Barton Poulson and in this brief course we'll explore the fundamental concepts of data fluency or the ability to work with data to extract insights, get new passive inquiry, and find suggestions for next steps.

We'll explore the different principles and techniques of data fluency in a software agnostic presentation that focuses on the goals of common procedures and how to get insights from them. We'll cover some useful methods for preparing data, exploring with quick visualizations, and getting common descriptive statistics like the mean and the standard deviation. And we'll make specific suggestions on how you can find value in any data set. Because this is a nontechnical overview anyone with an interest in informed decision making regardless of their technical background can get a better understanding of the ways that data can guide them to do the things that are important to them, and to do them more effectively and more efficiently.

So let's get started with Data Fluency: Exploring and Describing Data.