Book excerpt: Learn how to leverage the power of R for Business Intelligence About This Book Use this easy-to-follow guide to leverage the power of R analytics and make your business data more insightful. This highly practical guide teaches you how to develop dashboards that help you make informed decisions using R. Learn the A to Z of working with data for Business Intelligence with the help of this comprehensive guide. Who This Book Is For This book is for data analysts, business analysts, data science professionals or anyone who wants to learn analytic approaches to business problems. Basic familiarity with R is expected. What You Will Learn Extract, clean, and transform data Validate the quality of the data and variables in datasets Learn exploratory data analysis Build regression models Implement popular data-mining algorithms Visualize results using popular graphs Publish the results as a dashboard through Interactive Web Application frameworks In Detail Explore the world of Business Intelligence through the eyes of an analyst working in a successful and growing company. Learn R through use cases supporting different functions within that company. This book provides data-driven and analytically focused approaches to help you answer questions in operations, marketing, and finance. In Part 1, you will learn about extracting data from different sources, cleaning that data, and exploring its structure. In Part 2, you will explore predictive models and cluster analysis for Business Intelligence and analyze financial times series. Finally, in Part 3, you will learn to communicate results with sharp visualizations and interactive, web-based dashboards. After completing the use cases, you will be able to work with business data in the R programming environment and realize how data science helps make informed decisions and develops business strategy. Along the way, you will find helpful tips about R and Business Intelligence. Style and approach This book will take a step-by-step approach and instruct you in how you can achieve Business Intelligence from scratch using R. We will start with extracting data and then move towards exploring, analyzing, and visualizing it. Eventually, you will learn how to create insightful dashboards that help you make informed decisions—and all of this with the help of real-life examples.