18.2 No One is Above the Basics

Regardless of their field, when the best performers ply their crafts, they frequently return to the basics.  World-class musicians who play at Carnegie Hall spend hours a day practicing scales.  All-star level players in the National Basketball Association practice hundreds of free throws each day.  Top-tier analytics professionals should be no different!  We should be “getting our reps” every day, whether that means working our way through a DataCamp course on SQL joins, coding along with tutorials from Towards Data Science articles, or taking in a great Brandon Foltz video series on YouTube.  

Sometimes, when we work with students who are brand new to the field of analytics, we see them wanting to rush towards boosted tree models, convolutional neural nets, and t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding.  Don’t get us wrong – those are all wonderful things, and they all have direct applications towards analytics models.  But be sure to build a strong foundation in statistics first.