This guide shows how to combine data science with social science to gain unprecedented insight into customer behavior, so you can change it. Joanne Rodrigues-Craig bridges the gap between predictive data science and statistical techniques that reveal why important things happen -- why customers buy more, or why they immediately leave your site -- so you can get more behaviors you want and less you don’t.

Drawing on extensive enterprise experience and deep knowledge of demographics and sociology, Rodrigues-Craig shows how to create better theories and metrics, so you can accelerate the process of gaining insight, altering behavior, and earning business value. You’ll learn how to:

• Develop complex, testable theories for understanding individual and social behavior in web products
• Think like a social scientist and contextualize individual behavior in today’s social environments
• Build more effective metrics and KPIs for any web product or system
• Conduct more informative and actionable A/B tests
• Explore causal effects, reflecting a deeper understanding of the differences between correlation and causation
• Alter user behavior in a complex web product
• Understand how relevant human behaviors develop, and the prerequisites for changing them
• Choose the right statistical techniques for common tasks such as multistate and uplift modeling
• Use advanced statistical techniques to model multidimensional systems
• Do all of this in R (with sample code available in a separate code manual)