First Post

Dear Reader:

   Welcome to my blog! Here you can follow me while I advance my knowledge in analytics and the tools I will be using to provide evidence based results.

   First, I would like to tell you where I have been and where I foresee my heading. Then I shall give you readers an outline of the tools I will be using to increase my proficiency in performing sound analytics.

   I am a Public Health Studies major at Johns Hopkins University, where I focus on biostatistics and statistical programming. I have interned for two summers at the National Cancer Institute at National Institutes of Health, and analyzed thyroid cancer epidemiological data using SAS and R. Also, I have used SAS and Excel for data extraction, cleaning, and visualization of infectious disease and other health statistics of emergency departments across the U.S., while as an intern at the Department of Emergency Medicine at Johns Hopkins. Now I look forward to refining my knowledge about dimensional modeling and the ETL process for evidence-based decisions in healthcare analytics (but also applicable to overall business intelligence).

   For specific tools, I will focus on The Data Warehouse Toolkit- The Complete Guide to Dimensional Modeling, by Kimball and Ross, for an overview of dimensional modeling. Additionally I will apply analytical concepts and provide visualizations for examples using Powerpivot by MS Excel. The supplemental book for Powerpivot I will consult is: MS Excel 2013: Building Data Models with Power Pivot.

  Thanks for reading, and I hope you find the posts that follow insightful.

-Wayne