This little book about Big Data and R is different than other books or blogs you might have seen on both topics Big Data or the programming language R. Why? The book actually tries to integrate both topics in a unique way to help the reader, who is working in finance or the insurance industry, to better understand efficient data manipulation for purposes of data preparation, description, prediction and presentation.

The book shows that actually the small data sets matter most. They provide the crucial insights. The book guides the reader through more than 50 code examples. The codes and data sets can be downloaded from a link provided in the book. Moreover, the same data sets are used throughout the entire book. The data sets are cleaned, merged and enriched in the first chapter and described in the second chapter. Finally, some data features are predicted by numerous machine learning techniques in the third chapter. Results are presented in the fourth chapter. The reader will quickly gain an understanding how R works and how complex machine learning methods can be utilized.