What if you could peer into the minds of an entire population? What if you could target the weakest with rumours that only they saw?

In 2016, an obscure British military contractor turned the world upside down. Funded by a billionaire on a crusade to start his own far-right insurgency, Cambridge Analytica combined psychological research with private Facebook data to make an invisible weapon with the power to change what voters perceived as real.

The firm was created to launch the then unknown Steve Bannon's ideological assault on America. But as it honed its dark arts in elections from Trinidad to Nigeria, 24-year-old research director Christopher Wylie began to see what he and his colleagues were unleashing.

He had heard the disturbing visions of the investors. He saw what CEO Alexander Nix did behind closed doors. When Britain shocked the world by voting to leave the EU, Wylie realised it was time to expose his old associates. The political crime of the century had just taken place - the weapon had been tested - and nobody knew.

Gain the basics of Ruby's map, reduce, and select functions and discover how to use them to solve data-processing problems. This compact hands-on book explains how you can encode certain complex programs in 10 lines of Ruby code, an astonishingly small number. You will walk through problems and solutions which are effective because they use map, reduce, and select. As you read Ruby Data Processing, type in the code, run the code, and ponder the results. Tweak the code to test the code and see how the results change. After reading this book, you will have a deeper understanding of how to break data-processing problems into processing stages, each of which is understandable, debuggable, and composable, and how to combine the stages to solve your data-processing problem. As a result, your Ruby coding will become more efficient and your programs will be more elegant and robust. What You Will Learn Discover Ruby data processing and how to do it using the map, reduce, and select functions Develop complex solutions including debugging, randomizing, sorting, grouping, and more Reverse engineer complex data-processing solutions Who This Book Is For Those who have at least some prior experience programming in Ruby and who have a background and interest in data analysis and processing using Ruby.

To lead a data science team, you need to expertly articulate technology roadmaps, support a data-driven culture, and plan a data strategy that drives a competitive business plan. In this practical guide, you'll learn leadership techniques the authors have developed building multiple high-performance data teams. In How to Lead in Data Science you'll master techniques for leading data science at every seniority level, from heading up a single project to overseeing a whole company's data strategy. You'll find advice on plotting your long-term career advancement, as well as quick wins you can put into practice right away. Throughout, carefully crafted assessments and interview scenarios encourage introspection, reveal personal blind spots, and show development areas to help advance your career. Leading a data science team takes more than the typical set of business management skills. You need specific know-how to articulate technology roadmaps, support a data-driven culture, and plan a data strategy that drives a competitive business plan. Whether you're looking to manage your team better or work towards a seat at your company's top leadership table, this book will show you how.

The statistical analyses that students of the life-sciences are being expected to perform are becoming increasingly advanced. Whether at the undergraduate, graduate, or post-graduate level, this book provides the tools needed to properly analyze your data in an efficient, accessible, plainspoken, frank, and occasionally humorous manner, ensuring that readers come away with the knowledge of which analyses they should use and when they should use them. The book uses the statistical language R, which is the choice of ecologists worldwide and is rapidly becoming the 'go-to' stats program throughout the life-sciences. Furthermore, by using a single, real-world dataset throughout the book, readers are encouraged to become deeply familiar with an imperfect but realistic set of data. Indeed, early chapters are specifically designed to teach basic data manipulation skills and build good habits in preparation for learning more advanced analyses. This approach also demonstrates the importance of viewing data through different lenses, facilitating an easy and natural progression from linear and generalized linear models through to mixed effects versions of those same analyses. Readers will also learn advanced plotting and data-wrangling techniques, and gain an introduction to writing their own functions. Applied Statistics with R is suitable for senior undergraduate and graduate students, professional researchers, and practitioners throughout the life-sciences, whether in the fields of ecology, evolution, environmental studies, or computational biology.

This SpringerBrief reviews the knowledge engineering problem of engineering objectivity in top-k query answering; essentially, answers must be computed taking into account the user's preferences and a collection of (subjective) reports provided by other users. Most assume each report can be seen as a set of scores for a list of features, its author's preferences among the features, as well as other information is discussed in this brief. These pieces of information for every report are then combined, along with the querying user's preferences and their trust in each report, to rank the query results. Everyday examples of this setup are the online reviews that can be found in sites like Amazon, Trip Advisor, and Yelp, among many others. Throughout this knowledge engineering effort the authors adopt the Datalog+/- family of ontology languages as the underlying knowledge representation and reasoning formalism, and investigate several alternative ways in which rankings can b e derived, along with algorithms for top-k (atomic) query answering under these rankings. This SpringerBrief also investigate assumptions under which our algorithms run in polynomial time in the data complexity. Since this SpringerBrief contains a gentle introduction to the main building blocks (OBDA, Datalog+/-, and reasoning with preferences), it should be of value to students, researchers, and practitioners who are interested in the general problem of incorporating user preferences into related formalisms and tools. Practitioners also interested in using Ontology-based Data Access to leverage information contained in reviews of products and services for a better customer experience will be interested in this brief and researchers working in the areas of Ontological Languages, Semantic Web, Data Provenance, and Reasoning with Preferences.

Power BI Data Analysis and Visualization provides a roadmap to vendor choices and highlights why Microsoft's Power BI is a very viable, cost effective option for data visualization. The book covers the fundamentals and most commonly used features of Power BI, but also includes an in-depth discussion of advanced Power BI features such as natural language queries; embedding Power BI dashboards; and live streaming data. It discusses real solutions to extract data from the ERP application, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and also offers ways to host the Power BI Dashboard as an Azure application, extracting data from popular data sources like Microsoft SQL Server and open-source PostgreSQL. Authored by Microsoft experts, this book uses real-world coding samples and screenshots to spotlight how to create reports, embed them in a webpage, view them across multiple platforms, and more. Business owners, IT professionals, data scientists, and analysts will benefit from this thorough presentation of Power BI and its functions.

Data clustering is a highly interdisciplinary field, the goal of which is to divide a set of objects into homogeneous groups such that objects in the same group are similar and objects in different groups are quite distinct. Thousands of theoretical papers and a number of books on data clustering have been published over the past 50 years. However, few books exist to teach people how to implement data clustering algorithms. This book was written for anyone who wants to implement or improve their data clustering algorithms. Using object-oriented design and programming techniques, Data Clustering in C++ exploits the commonalities of all data clustering algorithms to create a flexible set of reusable classes that simplifies the implementation of any data clustering algorithm. Readers can follow the development of the base data clustering classes and several popular data clustering algorithms. Additional topics such as data pre-processing, data visualization, cluster visualization, and cluster interpretation are briefly covered. This book is divided into three parts-- Data Clustering and C++ Preliminaries: A review of basic concepts of data clustering, the unified modeling language, object-oriented programming in C++, and design patterns A C++ Data Clustering Framework: The development of data clustering base classes Data Clustering Algorithms: The implementation of several popular data clustering algorithms A key to learning a clustering algorithm is to implement and experiment the clustering algorithm. Complete listings of classes, examples, unit test cases, and GNU configuration files are included in the appendices of this book as well as in the downloadable resources. The only requirements to compile the code are a modern C++ compiler and the Boost C++ libraries.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Data Technologies and Applications, DATA 2016, held in Colmar, France, in July 2016. The 9 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 50 submissions. The papers deal with the following topics: databases, data warehousing, data mining, data management, data security, knowledge and information systems and technologies; advanced application of data.

This book provides an account of the use of computational tactical metrics in improving sports analysis, in particular the use of Global Positioning System (GPS) data in soccer. As well as offering a practical perspective on collective behavioural analysis, it introduces the computational metrics available in the literature that allow readers to identify collective behaviour and patterns of play in team sports. These metrics only require the bio-dimensional geo-referencing information from GPS or video-tracking systems to provide qualitative and quantitative information about the tactical behaviour of players and the inter-relationships between teammates and their opponents. Exercises, experimental cases and algorithms enable readers to fully comprehend how to compute these metrics, as well as introducing them to the ultimate performance analysis tool, which is the basis to run them on. The script to compute the metrics is presented in Python. The book is a valuable resource for professional analysts as well students and researchers in the field of sports analysis wanting to optimise the use of GPS trackers in soccer.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 22nd Annual Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology, RECOMB 2018, held in Paris, France, in April 2018. The 16 extended and 22 short abstracts presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 193 submissions. The short abstracts are included in the back matter of the volume. They report on original research in all areas of computational molecular biology and bioinformatics.

This text introduces and provides instruction on the design and analysis of experiments for a broad audience. Formed by decades of teaching, consulting, and industrial experience in the Design of Experiments field, this new edition contains updated examples, exercises, and situations covering the science and engineering practice. This text minimizes the amount of mathematical detail, while still doing full justice to the mathematical rigor of the presentation and the precision of statements, making the text accessible for those who have little experience with design of experiments and who need some practical advice on using such designs to solve day-to-day problems. Additionally, an intuitive understanding of the principles is always emphasized, with helpful hints throughout.

Statistical data and evidence-based claims are increasingly central to our everyday lives. Critically examining 'Big Data', this book charts the recent explosion in sources of data, including those precipitated by global developments and technological change. It sets out changes and controversies related to data harvesting and construction, dissemination and data analytics by a range of private, governmental and social organisations in multiple settings. Analysing the power of data to shape political debate, the presentation of ideas to us by the media, and issues surrounding data ownership and access, the authors suggest how data can be used to uncover injustices and to advance social progress.

This book gathers papers presented at the ECC 2016, the Third Euro-China Conference on Intelligent Data Analysis and Applications, which was held in Fuzhou City, China from November 7 to 9, 2016. The aim of the ECC is to provide an internationally respected forum for scientific research in the broad areas of intelligent data analysis, computational intelligence, signal processing, and all associated applications of artificial intelligence (AI). The third installment of the ECC was jointly organized by Fujian University of Technology, China, and VSB-Technical University of Ostrava, Czech Republic. The conference was co-sponsored by Taiwan Association for Web Intelligence Consortium, and Immersion Co., Ltd.

Discover relevant questions-and detailed answers-to help you prepare for job interviews and break into the field of analytics. This book contains more than 200 questions based on consultations with hiring managers and technical professionals already working in analytics. Interview Questions in Business Analytics: How to Ace Interviews and Get the Job You Want fills a gap in information on business analytics for job seekers. Bhasker Gupta, the founder and editor of Analytics India Magazine, has come up with more than 200 questions job applicants are likely to face in an interview. Covering data preparation, statistics, analytics implementation, as well as other crucial topics favored by interviewers, this book: Provides 200+ interview questions often asked by recruiters and hiring managers in global corporations Offers short and to-the-point answers to the depth required, while looking at the problem from all angles Provides a full range of interview questions for jobs ranging from junior analytics to senior data scientists and managers Offers analytics professionals a quick reference on topics in analytics Using a question-and-answer format from start to finish, Interview Questions in Business Analytics: How to Ace Interviews and Get the Job You Want will help you grasp concepts sooner and with deep clarity. The book therefore also serves as a primer on analytics and covers issues relating to business implementation. You will learn about not just the how and what of analytics, but also the why and when. This book will thus ensure that you are well prepared for interviews-putting your dream job well within reach. Business analytics is currently one of the hottest and trendiest areas for technical professionals. With the rise of the profession, there is significant job growth. Even so, it's not easy to get a job in the field, because you need knowledge of subjects such as statistics, databases, and IT services. Candidates must also possess keen business acumen. What's more, employers cast a cold critical eye on all applicants, making the task of getting a job even more difficult. What You'll Learn The 200 questions in this book cover such topics as: * The different types of data used in analytics * How analytics are put to use in different industries * The process of hypothesis testing * Predictive vs. descriptive analytics * Correlation, regression, segmentation and advanced statistics * Predictive modeling Who This Book Is For Those aspiring to jobs in business analytics, including recent graduates and technical professionals looking for a new or better job. Job interviewers will also find the book helpful in preparing interview questions.

Data-driven insights are a key competitive advantage for any industry today, but deriving insights from raw data can still take days or weeks. Most organizations can't scale data science teams fast enough to keep up with the growing amounts of data to transform. What's the answer? Self-service data. With this practical book, data engineers, data scientists, and team managers will learn how to build a self-service data science platform that helps anyone in your organization extract insights from data. Sandeep Uttamchandani provides a scorecard to track and address bottlenecks that slow down time to insight across data discovery, transformation, processing, and production. This book bridges the gap between data scientists bottlenecked by engineering realities and data engineers unclear about ways to make self-service work Build a self-service portal to support data discovery, quality, lineage, and governance Select the best approach for each self-service capability using open source cloud technologies Tailor self-service for the people, processes, and technology maturity of your data platform Implement capabilities to democratize data and reduce time to insight Scale your self-service portal to support a large number of users within your organization

Unique reference book covering the entire field of accounting information systems. Contributions from an international range of accounting and information systems experts. Includes coverage of contemporary themes such as big data, data security, cloud computing, IoT and blockchain.

Disaster management is a process or strategy that is implemented when any type of catastrophic event takes place. The process may be initiated when anything threatens to disrupt normal operations or puts the lives of human beings at risk. Governments on all levels as well as many businesses create some sort of disaster plan that make it possible to overcome the catastrophe and return to normal function as quickly as possible. Response to natural disasters (e.g., floods, earthquakes) or technological disaster (e.g., nuclear, chemical) is an extreme complex process that involves severe time pressure, various uncertainties, high non-linearity and many stakeholders. Disaster management often requires several autonomous agencies to collaboratively mitigate, prepare, respond, and recover from heterogeneous and dynamic sets of hazards to society. Almost all disasters involve high degrees of novelty to deal with most unexpected various uncertainties and dynamic time pressures. Existing studies and approaches within disaster management have mainly been focused on some specific type of disasters with certain agency oriented. There is a lack of a general framework to deal with similarities and synergies among different disasters by taking their specific features into account. This book provides with various decisions analysis theories and support tools in complex systems in general and in disaster management in particular. The book is also generated during a long-term preparation of a European project proposal among most leading experts in the areas related to the book title. Chapters are evaluated based on quality and originality in theory and methodology, application oriented, relevance to the title of the book.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the International Conference on Scalable Information Systems, INFOSCALE 2014, held in September 2014 in Seoul, South Korea. The 9 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 14 submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics such as scalable data analysis and big data applications.

This book provides comprehensive reviews of recent progress in matrix variate and tensor variate data analysis from applied points of view. Matrix and tensor approaches for data analysis are known to be extremely useful for recently emerging complex and high-dimensional data in various applied fields. The reviews contained herein cover recent applications of these methods in psychology (Chap. 1), audio signals (Chap. 2) , image analysis from tensor principal component analysis (Chap. 3), and image analysis from decomposition (Chap. 4), and genetic data (Chap. 5) . Readers will be able to understand the present status of these techniques as applicable to their own fields. In Chapter 5 especially, a theory of tensor normal distributions, which is a basic in statistical inference, is developed, and multi-way regression, classification, clustering, and principal component analysis are exemplified under tensor normal distributions. Chapter 6 treats one-sided tests under matrix variate and tensor variate normal distributions, whose theory under multivariate normal distributions has been a popular topic in statistics since the books of Barlow et al. (1972) and Robertson et al. (1988). Chapters 1, 5, and 6 distinguish this book from ordinary engineering books on these topics.

Big Data Analytics with Spark is a step-by-step guide for learning Spark, which is an open-source fast and general-purpose cluster computing framework for large-scale data analysis. You will learn how to use Spark for different types of big data analytics projects, including batch, interactive, graph, and stream data analysis as well as machine learning. In addition, this book will help you become a much sought-after Spark expert. Spark is one of the hottest Big Data technologies. The amount of data generated today by devices, applications and users is exploding. Therefore, there is a critical need for tools that can analyze large-scale data and unlock value from it. Spark is a powerful technology that meets that need. You can, for example, use Spark to perform low latency computations through the use of efficient caching and iterative algorithms; leverage the features of its shell for easy and interactive Data analysis; employ its fast batch processing and low latency features to process your real time data streams and so on. As a result, adoption of Spark is rapidly growing and is replacing Hadoop MapReduce as the technology of choice for big data analytics. This book provides an introduction to Spark and related big-data technologies. It covers Spark core and its add-on libraries, including Spark SQL, Spark Streaming, GraphX, and MLlib. Big Data Analytics with Spark is therefore written for busy professionals who prefer learning a new technology from a consolidated source instead of spending countless hours on the Internet trying to pick bits and pieces from different sources. The book also provides a chapter on Scala, the hottest functional programming language, and the program that underlies Spark. You'll learn the basics of functional programming in Scala, so that you can write Spark applications in it. What's more, Big Data Analytics with Spark provides an introduction to other big data technologies that are commonly used along with Spark, like Hive, Avro, Kafka and so on. So the book is self-sufficient; all the technologies that you need to know to use Spark are covered. The only thing that you are expected to know is programming in any language. There is a critical shortage of people with big data expertise, so companies are willing to pay top dollar for people with skills in areas like Spark and Scala. So reading this book and absorbing its principles will provide a boost-possibly a big boost-to your career.

Data has never mattered more. Our lives are increasingly shaped by it and how it is defined, collected and used. But who counts in the collection, analysis and application of data? This important book is the first to look at queer data - defined as data relating to gender, sex, sexual orientation and trans identity/history. The author shows us how current data practices reflect an incomplete account of LGBTQ lives and helps us understand how data biases are used to delegitimise the everyday experiences of queer people. Guyan demonstrates why it is important to understand, collect and analyse queer data, the benefits and challenges involved in doing so, and how we might better use queer data in our work. Arming us with the tools for action, this book shows how greater knowledge about queer identities is instrumental in informing decisions about resource allocation, changes to legislation, access to services, representation and visibility.

Modern terrorist networks pose an unprecedented threat to international security. The question of how to neutralize that threat is complicated radically by their fluid, non-hierarchical structures, religious and ideological motivations, and predominantly non-territorial objectives. Governments and militaries are crafting new policies and doctrines to combat terror, but they desperately need new technologies to make these efforts effective. This book collects a wide range of the most current computational research that addresses critical issues for countering terrorism, including: Finding, summarizing, and evaluating relevant information from large and changing data stores; Simulating and predicting enemy acts and outcomes; and Producing actionable intelligence by finding meaningful patterns hidden in huge amounts of noisy data. The book's four sections describe current research on discovering relevant information buried in vast amounts of unstructured data; extracting meaningful information from digitized documents in multiple languages; analyzing graphs and networks to shed light on adversaries' goals and intentions; and developing software systems that enable analysts to model, simulate, and predict the effects of real-world conflicts. The research described in this book is invaluable reading for governmental decision-makers designing new policies to counter terrorist threats, for members of the military, intelligence, and law enforcement communities devising counterterrorism strategies, and for researchers developing more effective methods for knowledge discovery in complicated and diverse datasets.

This volume provides an overview of multimedia data mining and knowledge discovery and discusses the variety of hot topics in multimedia data mining research. It describes the objectives and current tendencies in multimedia data mining research and their applications. Each part contains an overview of its chapters and leads the reader with a structured approach through the diverse subjects in the field.

This book constitutes revised selected papers from the second ECML PKDD Workshop on Data Analytics for Renewable Energy Integration, DARE 2014, held in Nancy, France, in September 2014. The 11 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this book.

Data Scientists at Work is a collection of interviews with sixteen of the world's most influential and innovative data scientists from across the spectrum of this hot new profession. "Data scientist is the sexiest job in the 21st century," according to the Harvard Business Review. By 2018, the United States will experience a shortage of 190,000 skilled data scientists, according to a McKinsey report. Through incisive in-depth interviews, this book mines the what, how, and why of the practice of data science from the stories, ideas, shop talk, and forecasts of its preeminent practitioners across diverse industries: social network (Yann LeCun, Facebook); professional network (Daniel Tunkelang, LinkedIn); venture capital (Roger Ehrenberg, IA Ventures); enterprise cloud computing and neuroscience (Eric Jonas, formerly Salesforce.com); newspaper and media (Chris Wiggins, The New York Times); streaming television (Caitlin Smallwood, Netflix); music forecast (Victor Hu, Next Big Sound); strategic intelligence (Amy Heineike, Quid); environmental big data (Andre Karpis ts enko, Planet OS); geospatial marketing intelligence (Jonathan Lenaghan, PlaceIQ); advertising (Claudia Perlich, Dstillery); fashion e-commerce (Anna Smith, Rent the Runway); specialty retail (Erin Shellman, Nordstrom); email marketing (John Foreman, MailChimp); predictive sales intelligence (Kira Radinsky, SalesPredict); and humanitarian nonprofit (Jake Porway, DataKind). The book features a stimulating foreword by Google's Director of Research, Peter Norvig. Each of these data scientists shares how he or she tailors the torrent-taming techniques of big data, data visualization, search, and statistics to specific jobs by dint of ingenuity, imagination, patience, and passion. Data Scientists at Work parts the curtain on the interviewees' earliest data projects, how they became data scientists, their discoveries and surprises in working with data, their thoughts on the past, present, and future of the profession, their experiences of team collaboration within their organizations, and the insights they have gained as they get their hands dirty refining mountains of raw data into objects of commercial, scientific, and educational value for their organizations and clients.