Stephen Few’s latest book, “Now you see it”

Stephen’s latest book is a brilliant interplay of simple to advanced statistical concepts with powerful visual equivalents and methods. It offers wonderful guidance with great examples around visualizing time series, correlations and multivariate analysis problems. It will have a major impact for many years to come in changing how business analysts work, think and improve their companies!

A friend of mine recently asked “… are statisticians becoming irrelevant” (hey, that’s me!) with the advent of advanced visualization tools like Tableau. I think the answer is yes and no. New tools like Tableau combined with methods expounded by Stephen will allow daily business questions to be answered rapidly. This should allow the statisticians to focus on tackling very high value problems where even a 1% improvement in the outcome is a huge win.

I have personally found that combining my work in data mining with beautiful stories about the results (created with Tableau) is truly impressive and informative for guiding decision-makers. Business decision-makers gain the advantages offered by advanced data mining algorithms such as decision trees, logistic regression and neural networks to identify primary predictive patterns and variables. The analyst can then clearly explain the results with compelling visuals to easily convey the findings and recommendations.

I think Stephen’s latest book will become the “gold” standard for data exploration books to follow. If you need the next step past “Show Me the Numbers“, this is it! BTW- it is even better than “Show Me the Numbers“, which is indeed very impressive. I plan to incorporate some of this book into my advanced Tableau course, “Data Exploration and Elegant Dashboards with Tableau”.