Can you learn it in a week of short courses or will it take a longer time horizon to become proficient?Cost (Free/Minimal, Low, High): Cost has two undesirable effects.
From a first-order perspective, the organization has to spend money.
This is not in-and-of-itself undesirable because the software companies can theoretically spend on R&D and other efforts to advance the product.
The second-order effect of lowering adoption is much more concerning.
High-cost tools tend to have much less discussion in the online world, whereas open source or low-cost tools have great trends.
Trend (0 = Fast Decline, 5 = Stable, 10 = Fast Growth): We used StackOverflow Insights of questions as a proxy for the trend of usage over time.
A major assumption is that growing number of Stack Overflow questions is that the usage is also increasing in a similar trend.
Individual Tool AssessmentR:DS4B Capability = 10: Has it all.
Great data science capability, great visualization libraries, Shiny for interactive web apps, rmarkdown for professional reporting.
Learning Curve = 4: A lot to learn, but learning is getting easier with the tidyverse.
Trend = 10: Stack overflow questions are growing at a very fast pace.
Cost = Low: Free and open sourcePython:DS4B Capability = 7: Has great machine learning and deep learning libraries.
Can connect to any major database.
Communication is limited by with Jupyter Notebook reporting tools.
Dash is an upcoming framework that is comparable to Shiny.
Learning Curve = 4: A lot to learn, but learning is relatively easy compared to other object-oriented programming languages like Java.
Trend = 10: Stack Overflow questions are growing at a very fast pace.
Cost = Low: Free and open sourceExcel:DS4B Capability = 4: Mainly a spreadsheet software but has programming built in with VBA.
Difficult to integrate R, but is possible.
No data science libraries.
Learning Curve = 10: Relatively easy to learn and become an advanced user.
Trend = 7: Stack overflow questions are growing at a relatively fast pace.
Cost = Low: Comes with Microsoft Office, which most organizations use.
Tableau:DS4B Capability = 6: Has R integrated, but is very difficult to implement advanced algorithms and not as flexible as R+shiny.
Learning Curve = 7: Very easy to learn.
Trend = 6: Stack overflow questions are growing at a relatively fast pace.
Cost = Low: Free public version.
Enterprise licenses are relatively affordable.
PowerBI:DS4B Capability = 5: Similar to Tableau, but not quite as feature-rich.
Can integrate R to some extent.
Learning Curve = 8: Very easy to learn.
Trend = 6: Expected to have same trend as Tableau.
Cost = Low: Free public version.
Licenses are very affordable.
Matlab:DS4B Capability = 6: Can do a lot with it, but lacks the infrastructure to use for business.
Learning Curve = 2: Matlab is quite difficult to learn.
Trend = 1: Stack overflow growth is declining at a rapid pace.
Cost = High: Matlab licenses are very expensive.
Licensing structure does not scale well.
SAS:DS4B Capability = 8: Has data science, database connection, business reporting and visualization capabilities.
Can also build applications.
However, limited by closed-source nature.
Does not get latest technologies like tensorflow and H2O.
Learning Curve = 4: Similar to most data science programming languages for the tough stuff.
Has a GUI for the easy stuff.
Trend = 3: Stack Overflow growth is declining.
Cost = High: Expensive for licenses.
Licensing structure does not scale well.
Code for the DS4B Tool Assessment VisualizationData Science Capability RatingOriginally published at https://www.
business-science.
io on December 27, 2017.
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