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

Project profitability


As a real-world example, let's consider a consulting services organization that has data collected describing its project work over time. This organization may be contracted to lead technology and/or business-related projects of all sizes and effort levels. Each project has expenses and revenues. Some projects are profitable, and some are not. The firm is interested in identifying which variables (if any) are candidates for predicting how profitable a project will be, in other words, which variables (in particular) are significant predictors of the dependent variable (in this case profitability)?

Examining the data, we see a good list of both variables and measurements; some of which are listed as follows:

  • Number of consultants assigned to the project full time (FT)
  • Number of consultants assigned to the project part-time (PT)
  • Number of sub-contractors assigned to the project (FT or PT)
  • Number of customer resources assigned to the project full time
  • Number of customer resources...