Learning goals

After working through the book, readers should be able to:

• translate a broad organizational concern into useful analytical questions;
• define project scope, deliverables, success criteria, responsibilities, and risks;
• document and protect data throughout its lifecycle;
• conduct and interpret a comprehensive exploratory data analysis;
• combine primary data with credible and compatible secondary evidence;
• select, justify, validate, and explain analytical and machine-learning methods;
• construct defensible forecasts and projections and communicate their uncertainty;
• develop recommendations that follow logically from evidence;
• design realistic implementation and evaluation plans; and
• communicate technical work to both specialist and nontechnical audiences.