Ben, Author at Ben's Blog

copilot power bi

Enable measure suggestions with Copilot in Power BI

2023-08-29 Ben Comments 0 Comment

In this short post, we’ll explore how to enable quick-measure suggestions using Copilot in Power BI. Quick measure feature in Power BI If you’re not already aware, Power BI has a feature called quick measure that allows you to simply drag and drop columns to generate predefined measures such as time intelligence, Top N, aggregate measures, etc… Another available feature was the Suggestions where you could simply use natural language to ask Power BI to generate the DAX code for…

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Fabric

Fabric is it really new?

2023-05-30 Ben Comments 0 Comment

Following Microsoft’s recent unveiling of Fabric, a ton of videos have flooded the internet, making it hard to keep pace, and even though I was part of the private preview I wanted to take some time to digest all the information before sharing my first thought about Fabric’s new release. While there are already plenty of blogs or tutorials about Fabric I also noticed that there were some claims about Fabric just being a rebranding or just a new way…

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Arithmetic Mean vs. Geometric Mean in Power BI

Arithmetic Mean vs. Geometric Mean in Power BI

2023-04-04 Ben Comments 0 Comment

In this blog post, we will explore the difference between the Arithmetic Mean and the Geometric Mean with some practical examples in Power BI using the built-in DAX function geomean. Arithmetic Mean The arithmetic mean, also known simply as the “mean” or “average,” is the most common measure of central tendency. It is calculated by summing all the values in a data set and then dividing by the number of values. In DAX, you can use the AVERAGE function to…

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One Hot Encoding in Power BI

2023-03-15 Ben Comments 0 Comment

In a recent post where I described how to implement multiple linear regression in Power BI, I had to perform one hot encoding to make my categorical variable usable by the model. So I decided to make another short post to explain what is hot encoding and how to implement it in Power BI using Power Query. Why do need to perform Hot Encoding? In machine learning or statistical algorithms, many models require to have only numerical input variables. So…

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Multiple Linear Regression in Power BI

Multiple Linear Regression in Power BI

2023-03-12 Ben Comments 14 Comments

In this post, I will describe how to implement Multiple Linear Regression in Power BI using DAX only. In the February 2023 release, Power BI introduced a new function called “Linest“, so we will see how to use it to make predictions and interpret its result. Linear Regression Linear regression is a type of statistical analysis used to find the relationship between two variables. It is used to determine how one variable (dependent variable) is related to another variable (independent…

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Incrementally load data from SQL database to azure data lake using synapse

2022-12-14 Ben Comments 7 Comments

In this post, we will cover how to create a simple and fully dynamic synapse pipeline to incrementally load data from an SQL database to parquet files stored in a data lake. Why should we move data from a database to a data lake In the traditional data warehouse approach, it is very common to move all the data sources and historize them into an ODS database.However, moving and storing data from all the data sources into a single database…

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Time to be mentored

2022-12-06 Ben Comments 0 Comment

Recently Paul Rendal has offered one more to mentor people in 2023. Nikola Ilic also mentioned that he was Paul’s mentee in 2020. Today Nikola is by far one of the top bloggers around Power BI and if he’s there today it is of course because of his expertise, hard work, and dedication to the community and also as he’s said himself because he had mentors to help him grow and Paul Rendal was one of them! So let’s talk…

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Reduce disk space used by Power BI Desktop

2022-11-14 Ben Comments 2 Comments

If like your C drive was running out of space and you decided to free up some space you may have realized that Power BI desktop was using a lot of your disk space. In this short post, we will see why Power BI desktop is consuming a lot of disk space and how we can safely reduce it. Analyze disk space usage There are multiple ways to analyze the disk usage space, we can use the built-in windows tool…

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optimize median measure in dax

Optimized median measure in Dax

2022-10-19 Ben Comments 1 Comment

In this post, I describe how to write an optimized median measure in Dax which under specific criteria can be 1,000 times faster than the built-in median function.Some time ago I was tasked to migrate a multidimensional cube to a tabular model, this cube had around 2 billion rows and I also had to create a median measure on the new tabular model. I first thought that the median would be much faster to calculate on a tabular model than on…

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Analysis services 2022 distinguish models

Analysis services 2022 new features deep dive part 1: Composite Model and DAX

2022-10-04 Ben Comments 0 Comment

Since the release of Analysis services 2022 I never took the chance to explore its new features and improvements so in this post I will deep dive into each new and updated feature. The public preview of SQL Server Analysis Services 2022 was released on May 2022 and at the time of writing this post, SSAS 2022 is still in public preview. Analysis Services 2022: Why don’t we just migrate to Azure AS or PBI premium? One might ask if…

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Chi square test in power bi

Chi-square test in Power BI

2022-08-23 Ben Comments 4 Comments

In this post, we will see how we can implement the Chi-square test in Power BI using DAX only.There are three main types of chi-square tests but in this post, we will focus only on the chi-square test for independence. What is Chi-square? A chi-square test for independence compares two variables (which can hold multiple values) in a contingency table to see if there is a relationship between each other. In other words, it tests to see whether distributions of categorical variables differ from each other. Another…

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pagination in azure data factory

How to perform pagination in azure data factory using Rest API

2022-07-01 Ben Comments 6 Comments

REST APIs typically have some mechanism to transmit large volumes of records broken up into pages of results. In this post, I describe how to perform pagination in azure data factory or Synapse pipeline using the Azure REST API. What is pagination Azure REST API limits the number of items it returns per result, so when the results are too large to be returned in one response we need need to make multiple calls to the rest API. So when the results…

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Show text results from an R visual in Power BI

2022-02-15 Ben Comments 2 Comments

In this short post, I will describe how to show text results from an R script visual in Power BI. Microsoft Idea Today there is already an idea submitted to Microsoft to enable this possibility however this idea does not have a lot of votes so it is not likely to be added anytime soon so then the workaround comes to the rescue! Why do we even need to show text result from an R visual? According to the multiple…

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paired t-test in power bi

Paired T-test in Power BI using DAX

2022-02-07 Ben Comments 12 Comments

In this post, I will describe how we can implement a paired t-test in Power BI using DAX only. What is T-Test A t-test is a type of inferential statistic that can be used to determine if the means of two groups of data are significantly different from each other. In other words, it tells us if the differences in means could have happened by chance. There are three types of t-test: An Independent Samples t-test compares the means for two groups. A Paired sample t-test compares means from…

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Hide tables in Power BI

2021-12-06 Ben Comments 7 Comments

It is possible to hide tables in Power BI by using the “Hide in report view” option, however, if a user downloads the PBIX file this is still possible to view hidden tables or to unhide tables and this is also true for the reports with a live connection to SSAS or PBI dataset. In this post, I’m going to show another way to hide tables in Power BI which prevents users or anyone to view the hidden tables. Hide…

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Retrieve MDX queries generated by Excel

Retrieve the MDX queries generated by Excel

2021-11-29 Ben Comments 2 Comments

When we use Excel to interact with an SSAS tabular model or a Power BI dataset via Analyze in Excel, Excel generates MDX queries which are then sent to the SSAS engine.So whenever a user is complaining about a pivot table connected to an SSAS or PBI dataset being too slow or showing wrong figures we may need to retrieve the MDX queries generated by Excel to investigate the issue. There are several ways to retrieve the MDX queries generated…

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Univariate Statistics with DAX

Univariate Statistics DAX Cheatsheet

2021-11-01 Ben Comments 0 Comment

In this small post, I’m sharing and will keep up to date the list of the most common univariate statistics DAX functions available in Power BI, as of now most of them are built-in functions but the more complex ones still require writing some Dax code. I’m sharing this through a Power Bi app where we can simply copy/paste the DAX code of the selected function. The Power BI

DAX Correlation coefficient

Correlation Coefficient in Power BI using DAX

2021-10-29 Ben Comments 13 Comments

In this post, I will describe what is the Pearson correlation coefficient and how to implement it in Power BI using DAX. What is the Correlation Coefficient The correlation coefficient is a statistical measure of the relationship between two variables; the values range between -1 and 1. A correlation of -1 shows a perfect negative correlation, and a correlation of 1 shows a perfect positive correlation. A correlation of 0.0 shows no linear relationship between the movement of the two variables. How…

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Poisson Cumulative Distribution in Power BI

Poisson Distribution in Power BI with DAX

2021-09-15 Ben Comments 6 Comments

In statistics, a Poisson distribution is a probability distribution that is used to show how many times an event is likely to occur in a fixed interval of time or space. In other words, it is the distribution for the counts of events that occur randomly in a given interval of time. It was named after French mathematician Siméon Denis Poisson. In this post, I’m going to describe how to implement the Poisson Distribution in Power BI with DAX. The Poisson distribution can be applied…

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Skewness and Kurtosis in Power BI with DAX

2021-08-24 Ben Comments 2 Comments

In this post, I will describe what Skewness and Kurtosis are, where to use them and how to write their formula in DAX. What is Skewness Skewness is a measure of symmetry, or more precisely, the lack of symmetry. A distribution, or data set, is symmetric if it looks the same to the left and right of the centre point. For a unimodal (one mode only) distribution, negative skew commonly indicates that the tail is on the left side of the distribution, and positive skew…

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ssas process partitioning

Performance Benefits of Partitioning in Analysis Services Tabular

2021-06-28 Ben Comments 2 Comments

I previously wrote a post on how to dynamically partitioning tables in SSAS tabular using SQL, but in this short post, I will focus on the performance side of partitioning. What is Partition Partitions split a table into logical partition objects. Each partition contains a portion of the data, partitions can be processed in parallel independent of other partitions or excluded from processing operations if they don’t need to be refreshed. Why partitioning improves the refresh performance The main reason…

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Dynamically partitioning tables in SSAS Tabular model using SQL

2021-05-31 Ben Comments 2 Comments

In this post, I describe how we can dynamically partitioning tables in SSAS tabular using SQL.This approach works well for most of the simple scenarios where we need to keep control over the number of partitions to refresh on a daily basis or any frequencies. What is partition Partitions split a table into logical partition objects. Each partition contains a portion of the data, partitions can be processed in parallel independent of other partitions or excluded from processing operations if…

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Clustering in Power BI using R

2021-04-19 Ben Comments 1 Comment

Since 2016 there’s a built-in feature in Power BI that allows us to automatically find clusters within our data.This is a great feature, however, its main drawback is that whenever we add new data into Power BI the clusters need to be manually recalculated for the new data. In this post, I will show how we can implement clustering in Power BI using R and automatically recalculate the clusters whenever we hit the refresh button. What is Clustering Clustering is the…

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bootstrap analysis with Power BI

Bootstrap analysis with Power BI

2021-02-15 Ben Comments 2 Comments

In this post, I share how to perform a bootstrap analysis with Power BI and briefly introduce what is bootstrapping and when to use it.

Data Dictionary Using DMV Queries

Data Dictionary Using DMV Queries

2021-01-16 Ben Comments 0 Comment

In this short post, I show how we can integrate a data dictionary using DMV queries within an SSAS tabular model and why we should do so. Why should we have a Data Dictionary within our model? The more complex a model becomes the more documentation we need to have about it. The more measures and complex formulas we have in a model the more calls/questions we have from end-users and thus the less time we can spend on getting…

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Power BI pass parameter to python script

Power BI pass parameter value to python script

2021-01-05 Ben Comments 3 Comments

In Power BI Desktop with Query Editor we can perform advanced custom transformation using Python or R script.

In this short post, I show how we can pass parameters to python script.

Clustered Columns with target marker for each bar

R – Power BI – Add target marker for each bar in a Grouped Bar Chart

2020-12-03 Ben Comments 6 Comments

As of now, in the Power BI Line and Clustered Column chart, we cannot Combine Clustered Columns with Clustered Lines or Markers.

In Power BI the markers all line up over the middle of the cluster instead of overlaying every single column.

So in this short post I share how to create such a visual using R.

AB Testing With Power BI

AB Testing with Power BI

2020-09-29 Ben Comments 58 Comments

A/B testing, or split testing, is a digital marketing technique that involves comparing two versions of a web page or application to see which performs better.

In this post, I am going to share a step by step guide to implement AB Testing with Power BI.

Power bi dymaic visuals using python

Power BI Dynamic visuals using Python in 1 minute

2020-06-02 Ben Comments 5 Comments

By now there’s plenty of good tutorials that explain how to create your own visualisations in Power BI by using R or Python like the Microsft one here.However, I haven’t seen any articles on how to create dynamic visuals by using Python (or R).So in this post, I’m going to show a very simple and fast way to create your power bi visuals by using python. (Same can be done using R) Goals of this Post Create visuals by using…

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SSAS/Power BI – Take Calculation Groups to the next level with Tabular Editor

2020-05-24 Ben Comments 0 Comment

Now it’s been a year since the game-changer new calculation groups feature has been released and I just thought that I still haven’t written a post on it. Goals of this Post Use Calculation Groups Use Tabular Editor Advanced Scripting Speed up SSAS/PowerBI model development Create reusbale script Setting up the Environment Power BI: Download here. Tabular Editor: Download here. SQL Server 2019 and later Analysis Services or Azure Analysis Services. At the time of writing this post, Calculation Group…

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Calculation Group in Power BI – Error: Time Calculation Requires selection of exactly one calculation item.

2020-04-21 Ben Comments 4 Comments

I first thought that the recent calculation group feature wasn’t working in a matrix when selecting more than one calculation item from a slicer, until, I realised that all I had to do to fix it was to simply disable the “column subtotals” option. To be honest I find the error message shown by PBI misleading. So if you encounter the error”Time Calculation Requires selection of exactly one calculation item” here is what you have to do to fix it:…

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Covid-19 – How is the outbreak growing? A deep dive analysis with Power BI

2020-04-18 Ben Comments 0 Comment

In this post, using Power BI I’ll try to uncover some useful insights and demonstrate that using the appropriate visuals help to analyse data more efficiently.

Dynamic format strings for currency conversion in PowerBi with DAX

2020-02-06 Ben Comments 2 Comments

I’ve previously written an article on how to dynamically convert and change the currency of a measure using a slicer.Now let’s see how we can use dynamic format strings for currency conversion in PowerBi with DAX. Model Prerequisite Add the FormatString column into your currency dimension You can download the file with the sample format string from here.Make sure to use a Unicode type column to store the different format strings otherwise the collation of your DB might not support…

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Dnamiy currency conversion with Dax

Dynamic Currency Conversion with DAX in Power BI

2019-09-08 Ben Comments 10 Comments

A common scenario in multinational companies is having to integrate different currency rates across transactional data.

So here is how we can convert and display data in different currencies in Power BI in a few simple steps.

Create interactive R custom visual in Power BI

2019-06-25 Ben Comments 0 Comment

In this short post we will see how can step by step create an interactive R custom visual in Power BI Prerequisites Install node.js: Download and Install the latest version of node.js from the node.js website Install R : Download and install the latest version of R from here.Once R is installed I also recommend you to install R Studio the integrated development environment for R. Enable R scripting in Power BI: In Power BI desktop, go to File >…

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DAX – TREATAS function – Book-to-Bill Ratio use case

2019-06-24 Ben Comments 0 Comment

Treatas is a powerful DAX function that applies the result of a table expression as filters to columns from an unrelated table. In other words, treatas applies the filter context of a specific table to another unrelated table (no relationship in the model). Book to Bill ratio A book-to-bill ratio is the ratio of orders received vs orders shipped and billed for a specific period, a month in our case. The book-to-bill ratio reveals how quickly a business fulfils the demand for…

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Power BI Exclude data based on Slicer selection

2019-06-13 Ben Comments 0 Comment

In Power BI the slicers allow us to filter and view only the information that we want but we can also in Power BI Exclude data based on Slicer selection. In this short post, I will show how we can reverse the behaviour of a slicer “excluding” the selected values instead of “filtering” the selected values. What is a Power BI Slicer? In Power BI a Slicer is a canvas visual that allows us user to filter and view only…

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Visual level filters for slicers

2019-06-11 Ben Comments 0 Comment

Since the latest Power BI release (June 2019) we are now able to filter a slicer based on a measure!And I think we’ve all been waiting for this feature for quite a while. One of the top reason we needed this feature was to have the ability to sync slicers. (Well this was already achievable with the bidirectionnel filter which is a really bad practice…) So as we can see on the example below the customer Alma has bought only…

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Ho to set up Jupyter notebook default folder in Anaconda

2019-05-20 Ben Comments 0 Comment

I have two laptops with Anaconda installed on both and I had some issues to find a working solution to configure the start in folder of Jupyther so I though it’d be a good idea to post the two solutions that worked for me. Using PowerShell command Open the windows powershell prompt or the powershell Anaconda prompt and type the following: This will generate a file to your user default directory: C:\Users\username\.jupyter\jupyter_notebook_config.py Then open this file in any Editor and…

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Visualising Deviation From Average in Power BI

2019-04-28 Ben Comments 2 Comments

In this post, I illustrate how to implement Deviation From Average in Power BI and why we should use it. Margin is a key metric to assess high-level performance of a company. But sometimes we want to measure and compare specific shop or department or employee performance with the entire company overall performance and this where deviation from average metric comes to help. The requirement are as follows: Company overall margin over time (which is just the margin average) Employee…

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DAX Time Intelligent – Single Measure For Multiple Dates

2019-04-11 Ben Comments 0 Comment

Let’s assume a scenario where we have 50 time intelligent measures and 5 dimension Dates (order, invoice, ship, due, calendar…). If we want the 50 measure to interact with the 5 dimensions we would need to create 250 measures which might rapidly overwhelm the users as they must sift though so many measures. This script below allows you to drag any dates with the YTD margin measure and the measure will dynamically apply the calculation accordingly and thus keeps our…

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SSRS Multi-Value parameter using DAX

2019-01-07 Ben Comments 2 Comments

In this post, we will how to set up multi-value parameters in SSRS using DAX. Setting up Multi-Value Parameter using DAX in SSRS with 3 steps For those who are already familiar with SSRS using MDX, it’ll be pretty straightforward as this is exactly the same logic, only the syntax changes and of course the language. In this post, I’m using the AdventureWorks Tabular model database which you can download here 1. Multi-Value Parameter We first need to create a…

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How to change the size of Plot Figure Matplotlib

2018-03-18 Ben Comments 0 Comment

When plotting figures with matplotlib you might want to change the size of the figure displayed. So here is a quick trick to adjust the size import matplotlib.pyplot as plt #Inside your plot code just type the following line of code #Set the plot width to 12 inches and height to 6 inches plt.rcParams[“figure.figsize”] = [12,6] For more details see the figure documentation .

T-Test: Dr. Semmelweis and the discovery of handwashing

2018-02-22 Ben Comments 0 Comment

This article only illustrates the use of t-test in a real life problem but does not provide any technical information on what is T-Test or how T-Test works. I will go through the T-test in details in another post and will link it into this post. Intro I was looking for a cool dataset to illustrate the use of T.test and I found this DataCamp project “Dr. Semmelweis and the discovery of handwashing”. This a straightforward project but I really…

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Export Data from Power BI into a file using R

2018-02-19 Ben Comments 0 Comment

We usually import Data from file into Power BI, but exporting data from Power BI can be very handy when you want to create a custom visual using R. In fact it can be very cumbersome to code your visual directly into the Power BI script editor. Here are few reasons why you should opt for exporting your Power Bi dataset first and re-import it in R to create your visual. Intellisense is not available in Power BI R script…

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Import multiple CSV files in R and load them all together in a single data frame

2018-02-04 Ben Comments 0 Comment

List of all the filenames One approach I found really straight forward is to create a list of all your filenames. You can also create a pattern to fetch your directory and returns all the matching files. In my example I need to read all the files starting with “FR”. The function lapply (equivalent of a loop) reads every single file presents in my list fileNames and store them into my variable zonnesFiles. The variable zonnesFiles is a list of…

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PowerBI – Dynamic Chart Title

2018-02-02 Ben Comments 0 Comment

Unlike Qlikview, the chart titles in PowerBI can only be static. as you can only pass a static text in the title parameter. However, there’s a way around it! The workaround I found is pretty simple you just need to fake a title by creating a measure which contains your title expression and drop this measure into a Card visual . Then by applying the same transparency and colours of your chart you just need to turn off the chart…

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For Loop vs Vectorization in R

2018-01-17 Ben Comments 0 Comment

A brief comparison between for loop and vectorization in R A short post to illustrate how vectorization in R is much faster than using the common for loop. In this example I created two vectors a and b witch will take some random numbers. I’ll compute the sum of a and b using the for loop and the vectorization approach and then compare the execution time taken by both of the different methods. I’ll repeat this test 10 times with…

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Central Limit Theorem -example using R

2018-01-07 Ben Comments 15 Comments

The Central Limit Theorem is probably the most important theorem in statistics. In this post I’ll try to demystify the CLT with clear examples using R. The central limit theorem (CLT) states that given a sufficiently large sample size from a population with a finite level of variance, the mean of all samples from the same population will be approximately equal to the mean of the original population. Furthermore, the CLT states that as you increase the number of samples…

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Coursera Data Science Specialization Review

2017-12-14 Ben Comments 0 Comment

“Ask the right questions, manipulate data sets, and create visualizations to communicate results.” “This Specialization covers the concepts and tools you’ll need throughout the entire data science pipeline, from asking the right kinds of questions to making inferences and publishing results. In the final Capstone Project, you’ll apply the skills learned by building a data product using real-world data. At completion, students will have a portfolio demonstrating their mastery of the material.” The JHU Data Science Specialization is one of…

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