From the course: Data Science Foundations: Fundamentals

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Descriptive analytics

Descriptive analytics

From the course: Data Science Foundations: Fundamentals

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Descriptive analytics

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- [Instructor] When it comes to business decisions, humans and machines approach things very differently. One element of this is that machines have essentially perfect memory. You can give it to them once, and they'll probably give it back to you exactly the same way later. They are also able to see all of the data at once in detail in a way that humans can't. On the other hand, they're not very good at spotting general patterns in data. There are some ways around that, but it's not one of the strong points of algorithms. Human decision makers, on the other hand, are very good at finding patterns and connecting the data to outside situations. On the other hand, humans have limited cognitive bandwidth. We can only think of so many things at a time. One of the consequences of that is that we need to simplify the data. We need to narrow it down to a manageable level and try to find the signal in the noise. And so descriptive analyses are one way of doing this. It's a little like cleaning…

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