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

Back to boosting


At this point, we have covered all of the topics most pertinent to boosting, so let's now get back to the main event, statistical boosting.

We have already offered a description of what statistical boosting is and what it is used for (a learning algorithm intended to reduce bias and variance and convert weak learners into strong ones).

Key to this concept is the idea of how learners inherently behave, with a weak learner defined as one which is only slightly correlated with the true classification (it can label examples better than random guessing). In contrast, a strong learner is one that is well-correlated with the true classification.

How it started

Boosting an algorithm in an attempt to improve performance is, in reality, hypothetical. That is, it is a question every data scientist should ask for their statistical algorithm or model.

This is known in statistics as the hypothesis-boosting question and is all about the data scientist finding a way to even slightly improve...