Book Image

Principles of Data Science

Book Image

Principles of Data Science

Overview of this book

Need to turn your skills at programming into effective data science skills? Principles of Data Science is created to help you join the dots between mathematics, programming, and business analysis. With this book, you’ll feel confident about asking—and answering—complex and sophisticated questions of your data to move from abstract and raw statistics to actionable ideas. With a unique approach that bridges the gap between mathematics and computer science, this books takes you through the entire data science pipeline. Beginning with cleaning and preparing data, and effective data mining strategies and techniques, you’ll move on to build a comprehensive picture of how every piece of the data science puzzle fits together. Learn the fundamentals of computational mathematics and statistics, as well as some pseudocode being used today by data scientists and analysts. You’ll get to grips with machine learning, discover the statistical models that help you take control and navigate even the densest datasets, and find out how to create powerful visualizations that communicate what your data means.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Principles of Data Science
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Machine learning isn't perfect


There are many caveats of machine learning. Many are specific to different models being implemented, but there are some assumptions that are universal for any machine learning model, as follows:

  • The data used is, for the most part, is preprocessed and cleaned using the methods outlined in the earlier chapters.

    Almost no machine learning model will tolerate dirty data with missing values or categorical values. Use dummy variables and filling/dropping techniques to handle these discrepancies.

  • Each row of a cleaned dataset represents a single observation of the environment we are trying to model.

  • If our goal is to find relationships between variables, then there is an assumption that there is some kind of relationship between these variables.

    This assumption is particularly important. Many machine learning models take this assumption very seriously. These models are not able to communicate that there might not be a relationship.

  • Machine learning models are generally...