Book Image

Statistics for Data Science

Book Image

Statistics for Data Science

Overview of this book

Data science is an ever-evolving field, which is growing in popularity at an exponential rate. Data science includes techniques and theories extracted from the fields of statistics; computer science, and, most importantly, machine learning, databases, data visualization, and so on. This book takes you through an entire journey of statistics, from knowing very little to becoming comfortable in using various statistical methods for data science tasks. It starts off with simple statistics and then move on to statistical methods that are used in data science algorithms. The R programs for statistical computation are clearly explained along with logic. You will come across various mathematical concepts, such as variance, standard deviation, probability, matrix calculations, and more. You will learn only what is required to implement statistics in data science tasks such as data cleaning, mining, and analysis. You will learn the statistical techniques required to perform tasks such as linear regression, regularization, model assessment, boosting, SVMs, and working with neural networks. By the end of the book, you will be comfortable with performing various statistical computations for data science programmatically.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Chapter 1. Transitioning from Data Developer to Data Scientist

In this chapter (and throughout all of the chapters of this book), we will chart your course for starting and continuing the journey from thinking like a data developer to thinking like a data scientist.

Using developer terminologies and analogies, we will discuss a developer's objectives, what a typical developer mindset might be like, how it differs from a data scientist's mindset, why there are important differences (as well as similarities) between the two and suggest how to transition yourself into thinking like a data scientist. Finally, we will suggest certain advantages of understanding statistics and data science, taking a data perspective, as well as simply thinking like a data scientist.

In this chapter, we've broken things into the following topics:

  • The objectives of the data developer role
  • How a data developer thinks
  • The differences between a data developer and a data scientist
  • Advantages of thinking like a data scientist
  • The steps for transitioning into a data scientist mindset

So, let's get started!