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

Dimensional reduction


Clustering is intended to group data variables that are found to be interrelated, based on observations of their attributes' values. However, given a scenario with a large number of attributes, the data scientist will find that some of the attributes will usually not be meaningful for a given cluster. In the example, we used earlier in this chapter (dealing with patient cases), we could have found this situation. Recall that we performed a hierarchical cluster analysis on smokers only. Those cases include many attributes, such as, sex, age, weight, height, no_hospital_visits, heartrate, state, relationship, Insurance blood type, blood_pressure, education, date of birth, current_drinker, currently_on_medications, known_allergies, currently_under_doctors_care, ever_operated_on, occupation, heart_attack, rheumatic_fever, heart_murmur, diseases_of_the_arteries, and so on.

Note

As a data scientist, you can use the R function names, as we did earlier in this chapter, to see...