As producers of tables and graphs, we need to effectively present valid summaries. This is why lessons from “How to Lie with Statistics” (by Darell Huff) are relevant even though each of us probably generates more data in a single day than existed in the entire world at the writing of the book. Ultimately, that’s how the biggest decisions are made: with a few pieces of data a human can process. Time and again, I’ve seen thousands of work hours on complex algorithms summarized in a single number. How to Lie With Statistics is a 65-year-old book that can be read in an hour and will teach you more practical information you can use every day than any book on “big data” or “deep learning.” For all promised by machine learning and petabyte-scale data, the most effective techniques in data science are still small tables, graphs, or even a single number that summarize a situation and help us - or our bosses - make a decision informed by data.
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