Stats in the Wild

Here’s something I started to write a few months ago, but never got around to finish it off.

Neil Charles over at Wallpapering Fog has just written an excellent post about the growing importance of R and Tableau to the modern day analyst. Although not as old in the tooth as Neil (sorry Neil), even in the last 5 years, there has been a definite movement towards a much wider skill set for everyday analysis, at least within marketing.

The days of only using the likes of SPSS, SAS and Excel are long gone as the need to make work more repeatable, scalable and downright flexible. Today’s analyst needs to be comfortable getting hold of new datasources that don’t necessarily sit in an excel file or in tabular form, manipulating it, using a statistical technique that they didn’t necessarily learn at university and then visualising the results (maybe on a…