Part 3. Working in the real world

In part 2, we covered how to build a model that addresses the problem that you want to solve. The next steps are to implement your solution and communicate your results to other interested parties. In part 3, we conclude with the important steps of deploying work into production, documenting work, and building effective presentations.

Chapter 11 covers the documentation necessary for sharing or transferring your work to others, in particular those who will be deploying your model in an operational environment. This includes effective code commenting practices, as well as proper version management and collaboration with the version control software, Git. We also discuss the practice of reproducible research using knitr. Chapter 11 also covers how to export models you’ve built from R, or deploy them as HTTP services.

Chapter 12 discusses how to present the results of your projects to different audiences. Project sponsors, project consumers (people in the organization who’ll be using or interpreting the results of your model), and fellow data scientists will all have different perspectives and interests. We also give examples of how to tailor your presentations to the needs and interests of a specific audience.

On completing part 3, you’ll understand how to document and transfer the results of your project and how to effectively communicate your findings to other interested parties.