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

Data mining


It is always prudent to start explaining things with a high-level definition.

Data mining can be explained simply as assembling information concerning a particular topic or belief in an understandable (and further useable) format. Keep in mind though that the information assembled is not the data itself (as with data querying) but information from the data (more on this later in this chapter).

Data mining should also not be confused with analytics, information extraction, or data analysis. Also, it can be manual or by hand, a semi-automatic, or automatic process. When working with new data, it will typically be a manual process that the data scientist will perform. Later, when working with newer versions of the same data (source), it may become automated to some level or degree.

Data mining is the probing carried out by a data scientist to find previously unknown information within the data, such as:

  • Patterns, such as groups of data records, known as clusters
  • Unusual records, known...