Chapter 1 Welcome to A Business Analyst’s Introduction to Business Analytics

Figure 1.1: Book to be available soon.

This book is still very much a draft, but it is the first book of its kind, so you might find it useful in its current form. Some highlights:

• First textbook addressing a complete business analytics workflow including data manipulation, data visualization, modelling business problems with graphical models, translating graphical models into code, and presenting insights back to stakeholders.
• Content is accessible to anyone, even most analytics beginners. If you have taken a stats course, you are good to go.
• Provides a solid foundation and an implementable workflow for anyone wading into the Bayesian inference waters.
• Assumes no knowledge of R. Provides introduction to R, RStudio, and the Tidyverse.
• Provides a complete workflow within the R-ecosystem; there is no need to learn several programming languages or work through clunky interfaces between software tools.
• First textbook using greta, an R interface to TensorFlow for Bayesian inference and the causact package for visual model development.

To use some of the datasets and functions that accompany this book, you will eventually need to install the causact R package (if you do not know how to do this yet, no worries … you will learn how to run the below line of code using RStudio in the introductory chapters):

install.packages("causact")

You will most likely use this package with greta (an R package) and TensorFlow (a free and open-source software library). Properly installing causact, greta, and Tensorflow can be done by following the instructions here: https://www.causact.com/install-tensorflow-greta-and-causact.html.

If you want to jump to causact package specifics, start here: https://www.causact.com/causact-quick-inference-with-generative-dags.html#causact-quick-inference-with-generative-dags.

Please note that this work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). To support this work send feedback/follow me via Twitter:

and please stay tuned to this page for the launch of the upcoming printed version.

A Business Analyst’s Introduction to Business Analytics by Adam Fleischhacker is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.