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

R and statistical analysis


Just a note here on the use of R for statistical analysis, data profiling exercises as well as adding perspectives (establish context) to data to be used in visualizations.

R is a language and environment that is easy to learn, very flexible in nature, and also very focused on statistical computing, making it great for manipulating, cleaning, summarizing, producing probability statistics (as well as, actually creating visualizations with your data), so it's a great choice for the exercises required for profiling, establishing context, and identifying additional perspectives.

In addition, here are a few more reasons to use R when performing any kind of data or statistical analysis:

  • R is used by a large number of academic statisticians, so it's a tool that is not going away.
  • R is pretty much platform independent; what you develop will run almost anywhere.
  • R has awesome help resources. Just Google it and you'll see!