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

Establishing the nature of data


When asked about the objectives of statistical analysis, one often refers to the process of describing or establishing the nature of a data source.

Establishing the nature of something implies gaining an understanding of it. This understanding can be found to be both simple as well as complex. For example, can we determine the types of each of the variables or components found within our data source; are they quantitative, comparative, or qualitative?

Using the example transactional data source used earlier in this chapter, we can identify some variables by types, as the following:

  • Quantitative: quantity
  • Comparative: sale_type
  • Qualitative: sales_region
  • Categorical: product_name

A more advanced statistical analysis aims to identify patterns in data; for example, whether there is a relationship between the variables or whether certain groups are more likely to show certain attributes than others.

Note

Exploring the relationships presented in data may appear to be similar...