Data Analysis

[[Not yet Finished]]

Data Analysis is about

• analysis/understanding data, 
• answering questions,
• predicting what-is-going-to-happen, in short predicting future

If you're new to data analysis then you might want to take a free course at Coursera.org. It's an 8 week online course.
No specific background is needed but you must have some knowledge of basic statistic concepts such as mean, median, mode, variance, etc. and hands on experience on any programming language.
In this course R language has been used for demonstration and can be downloaded for free from CRAN.
 Here are the highlights of this course (as I go through weekly video lectures)

1. Steps in Data Analysis
• Record each step
• Define the question
• Define the  ideal data set
• Determine what data you can access
• Obtain the data
• Clean the data
• Exploratory data analysis
• Statistical prediction/modeling
• Interpret results
• Challenge results
• Synthesize/write up results
• Create reproducible code

Links to Basic Concepts - http://hbpms.blogspot.in/2008/05/stage-1-elementary-stuff.html