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

Key objectives of data science


As mentioned in Chapter 1, Transitioning from Data Developer to Data Scientist, the idea of how data science is defined is a matter of opinion.

I personally like the explanation that data science is a progression or, even better, an evolution of thought or steps, as shown in the following figure:

This data science evolution (depicted in the preceding figure) consists of a series of steps or phases that a data scientist tracks, comprising the following:

  • Collecting data
  • Processing data
  • Exploring and visualizing data
  • Analyzing (data) and/or applying machine learning (to data)
  • Deciding (or planning) based on acquired insight

Although a progression or evolution implies a sequential journey, in practice, this is an extremely fluid process; each of the phases may inspire the data scientist to reverse and repeat one or more of the phases until they are satisfied. In other words, all or some phases of the process may be repeated until the data scientist determines that the...