Getting your hands dirty with data

There are significant number of people employed in the analytics industry who do not have an academic background in quantitative disciplines like Statistics, Mathematics or Econometrics. If you evaluate various solutions applied to solving business problems in the industry, there is always a statistical rigor behind these solutions. There are many folks in the industry, with diverse backgrounds like engineering, environmental sciences, pharmacy etc.who have done exceedingly well in the field of analytics. There are a couple of qualities required for such professionals to succeed in analytics:

• Ability and willingness to learn the mathematics behind the solutions
• Analyzing large datasets

In this article let us concentrate on data. This may sound cliché but data is the basic building block of analytics. Without data there is no analytics.  Fortunately for analytics, there is abundance of data now. There are companies in the world, whose business is to collect and store data. Digital age has certainly helped and we collect all kinds of data from transaction data in retail stores to medical statistics of new born babies. For people who do not have rigorous training in quantitative discipline like Statistics, they will not possibly have seen large amounts of data. Analytics can involve looking and working with large amounts of data, sometimes millions of observations. This can be overwhelming. Often you would use more than one data source to process the information for business objectives. The problem is not computational in nature, since with powerful computers and servers it has been largely possible to work with huge datasets. I refer to the ability to manually scroll through data and find trends and find reasons behind insights provided to the clients. This is because analytics is all about insights and insights come from looking at data very very closely.

Let us go through an example. Take the case of a simple regression model to know the price elasticity of a product. Price elasticity can be described as the change in sales of a product compared to change in price. A prerequisite to this model would be to look if the price change exists. In order to answer this question, one would need to find the percentage of change in prices of the product for all the stores in the data. A custom code would have to be written to do this. The datasets size could vary from 50000 observations to few lakhs. The analyst would then have to study the price changes to come to a conclusion on the validity of the model.

So if you are looking to join the analytics industry, be ready to look at large volumes of data to justify your results.

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In our world of rising costs and shrinking funds, a rising number of colleges are in real financial trouble. Institutes are deep in debt as they’ve borrowed heavily to fix aging infrastructure, keep up with competitors and lure students with state of the art amenities. In an increasingly competitive sector, education  institutes need to develop programs that meet the market need. But what is more critical is finding ways to improve student retention, grades and services to students. To do this efficiently and effectively, educators and administrators need deeper insights into what impacts student completion rates, learning outcomes, and yet fulfills the goals of the institution bringing increased returns. Analytics once again could provide these answers.

Yes, as with most organizations everywhere, educational institutes are also collecting huge amounts of data every day. Generated by students, faculty and administration, this data can be analyzed to discover meaningful patterns, and then used to make important operational decisions. Broadly speaking Analytics can help Education institutions:

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Jigsaw Academy, a premier online analytics training companies, announces the launch of its video based courses in Retail Analytics, Financial Analytics and Analytics with R. “The mix of video, interactive Q&A sessions and application oriented real life case studies will create a dynamic learning environment for our students,” said Gaurav Vohra, CEO and co founder of Jigsaw Academy.

These 15-20 hour self-paced video courses have been created by industry experts who have applied analytics to solve a variety of business problems in diverse domains. The video courses allow much flexibility, as students can start the course at any time. It also works out to be more cost effective. “The big advantage of our video courses is offline faculty support. Participants will get access to faculty via email, phone or Skype for help with the course as required. They can even set up one on one time with trainers to go through concepts that you find challenging,” says Sarita Digumarti, co founder and faculty at Jigsaw Academy.

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Well we at Jigsaw have here a simple test for you. Answer the questions below and see if you have what it takes to be a data scientist.

1. Do you have a inherent aptitude for numbers?
2. Are you a curious, persistent person?
3. Are you apt at the art of visual storytelling?
4. Are you an effective communicator? Will you be able to creatively and persuasively communicate, the stories the data tells?
5. Are you business savvy( i.e a good leader, great organizer and planner)?
6. Are you a team player?

If you answered yes to the above questions then you definitely have the innate qualities of a data scientist. Well done. That’s half the battle!  Now let’s see if you have the academic background, technical skills and expertise that’s needed to make a career in data science.

1. Do you have a degree in a scientific discipline like Statistics, Mathematics or one of the Sciences and a strong technical background?
2. Have you had previous exposure to working with large amounts of data, preferably even some data mining algorithms?
3. Do you have experience in common predictive modeling techniques, their application and best practices?
4. Do you have expertise in diverse analytical tools? If not are you willing to invest in learning them?

If you answered yes to all of these it’s fantastic! Get going. Start applying for the coveted data science jobs.

If you answered no to a few of them, don’t despair. Perhaps you can invest in obtaining these skills and getting the relevant experience. The reality is, that there is a huge demand for analytics professionals and the industry is slated for exponential growth over the next decade. Gain the skills you need….the jobs are waiting.

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Finding trained and competent analytics personnel has become one of the biggest challenges for employers in India. Hence, in order to solve this issue, a large number of analytics training institutes have surfaced all over the country. These institutes focus on training the candidates in the best possible manner so as to make them a perfect fit in Business Analytics and Business Intelligence Sector. Here in this post I have compiled a list of top ten analytics training institutes in order to help you in picking the right one for building your career.

1. Jigsaw Academy, Bangalore

The online academy has the head office in Bangalore and offers the students with training on the latest techniques and tools associated with analytics field.  This unique online platform utilizes a combination of virtual lab and virtual classrooms to offer unique and top notch learning experience. Students can also opt for self-paced video-based courses.

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Jigsaw Academy, a premier online analytics training institute offers a variety of courses to train students, professionals and corporates on the latest tools and techniques in the field of analytics. They use cutting-edge technology to successfully improve the portable classroom experience for its students across the world. It’s carefully-designed courses are a unique blend of statistics, statistical tools and industry knowledge, all taught through real life examples. Today, there is a huge shortage of analytics talent in the industry. Jigsaw’s courses are an excellent opportunity for those interested in entering the analytics arena to gain the SAS and other analytics skills they need.

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Vision: Empowering clients to make scientific, data driven decisions.

Mission: To create decision enabling tools, which combine the power of predictive analytics and the latest technology, and enable the user to make the right decision at the right time with the right data.

Headquartered in Kolkata, SIBIA founded by Angshuman Bhattacharya is an up and coming marketing and consumer analytics venture that Jigsaw Academy is proud to feature this week. Truly enabling smarter decisions, the team at SIBIA has more than 40 years of experience in the field of analytics. They bring to the table an expert knowledge of best practices in multiple types of marketing and customer analytics and multi disciplinary knowledge across technology, statistics and econometrics among others.

In a recent interview, Angshuman was kind enough take us behind the scenes of SIBIA. He told us what inspired him to start this venture, his vision for SIBIA as well as his predictions for the future of analytics. Here are some excerpts from the interview.

What inspired you to start SIBIA?

After more than a decade in analytics, working for top IT service companies as well as specialized analytics services companies, there were a few things that began to haunt me:

The way analytics was being served: We used to do very deep analyses on clients data, often without properly understanding the business or how they were going to use it. We would make presentations with limited connections to the business challenge. There was no way that the insights thus gained could be used by the client in the strategic planning process. In many cases, the outcome was a nice academic exercise.

Offline Approach: The overall approach of analytics, in general, was more ‘offline’, not a real time business enabler. The world being dynamic and ever changing, analytics has to be predictive and usable in real time in order to make it more useful in the hands of the business user.

SMBs were largely ignored: Traditional analytics solution providers as well as the specialized analytics softwares vendors have traditionally seen only the enterprises as their market, in mainly the US and UK markets. However, the large market of small and medium businesses (SMBs) area were also hungry to optimize their processes across functions, leverage their data and generate analytics insights as well as embed analytics in their decision making process.

In an effort to address the above issues SIBIA was born. We wanted to serve the SMB market with solutions that were affordable, usable and fast. It required coming out from the mould of serving large enterprises, but I believe we are successful in adopting this model.  It’s the classic bottom of the pyramid approach that Late Prof C K Prahlad has taught the world! Different from the traditional analytics model, but equally effective.

What is SIBIA all about?

The concept is simple – take the black box of methodology out of the client delivery, and provide them final predictive output and a system where they can create and evaluate scenarios. Take the data, create and run analyses offline in our development center, and deliver the outcome as a packaged solution. This way, the client need not bother about any technology or methodology, but will receive an effective outcome. We own the methodology part and do our best to optimize the models.

Our offerings are affordable. Created around open source technologies, cloud computing and valuable partnerships with software providers, we can offer a solution for almost any budget.

What advice do you have for others contemplating an analytics start up?

• Keep your eyes wide open, and think out of the box!
• Use available technology solutions to benefit the client. Leverage Database systems. Adopt open source statistical softwares.
• Focus on a domain/ industry/ process you are knowledgeable in. If you have the business domain skill, your solution will be much more effective.
• Create a solution or business model around the client objectives, not around a methodology/ process that you are comfortable with.

Learnings

There were many a humble learning experiences. We learnt that using cost effective technologies does not involve a trade off on quality/ effort requirement. New technologies are only limited by our knowledge and dexterity to use them. Every project was a learning experience and we are still learning but now we know the horizons.

Future of analytics/SIBIA

Analytics needs to break free from the captivity of the large and few. We need to provide analytics for all sizes and shape and for many purposes rather than a few. Firms that work towards this will not only be successful in the long run, but will also define the shape of the industry.

Open source technologies, cloud computing, newer methods of data mining/ pattern recognition, data visualization all will play pivotal role in defining the analytics of future. Also many new areas of analytics application, which are not traditionally thought of having potential for data analytics, will emerge as challenge areas.

We, at SIBIA, are focusing on creating a model where multi disciplinary and multiple skills are leveraged to create a complete solution. We are committed to bringing excellence and innovation to the solutions we develop.

In the few months of our existence, we have had some challenging projects that involved for example advanced analytics for digital marketing. This took us out of our comfort zone. But we were able to deliver successfully and this has done loads for our confidence. As a marketing analytics focused firm, it also opened up a new area where digital and traditional marketing can talk to each other and can be analyzed as a complete marketing process. We realized that a challenging area of fusion analytics in marketing exists. It was the best learning we had in recent times. We are now focusing our solutions in these areas too.

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Though big data and analytics is already a buzz word in business circles, it’s potential is continuously reaching out further to touch the everyday ordinary lives of the common people. Can you imagine using analytics to help your child decide their future? Well companies like IBM are beginning to develop predictive, prescriptive analytics platforms in education that will help parents guide their children to a career best suited to them. Isn’t that amazing?

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