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

How do we obtain and sample data?


If statistics is about taking samples of populations, it must be very important to know how we obtain these samples, and you'd be correct. Let's focus on just a few of the many ways of obtaining and sampling data.

Obtaining data

There are two main ways of collecting data for our analysis: observational and experimentation. Both these ways have their pros and cons, of course. They each produce different types of behavior and, therefore, warrant different types of analysis.

Observational

We might obtain data through observational means, which consists of measuring specific characteristics but not attempting to modify the subjects being studied. For example, you have a tracking software on your website that observes users' behavior on the website, such as length of time spent on certain pages and the rate of clicking on ads, all the while not affecting the user's experience, then that would be an observational study.

This is one of the most common ways to get data...