IBM Watson Analytics brings smart data analysis and visualization, guided data discovery, automated predictive analytics, and cognitive capabilities to you as a service.

Through the process of making a project, this book attempts to help developers and business users alike learn the various computing and analytical capabilities of IBM Watson Analytics.

This book looks at each and every capability of the IBM Watson Analytics platform, such as speeding up predictive analytics for better business insights, building tailored interactions for an improved customer experience, identifying trends, investigating potential issues, and so on, thereby allowing readers to start building projects in their business context using Watson Analytics.

By the end of this book, you should be ready to use Watson Analytics to make better data-driven decisions, as well as visualize and communicate any analysis of your data that you might gain using Watson Analytics.

In this first chapter, we will try to define the latest version of IBM Watson Analytics and look at the various objectives of the tool. In addition, this chapter will provide an overview of Watson's interface, as well its major components, to offer a refresher on some basic tasks, such as adding data, exploring data, and creating a prediction.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

• Definition and objectives
• Exploring the Watson interface
• A refresher of the basic tasks