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 assessment and data quality assurance


To be methodical with our discussions here, let's look at how data assessment compares or stacks up to data quality (assurance).

Data quality assurance, or often referred to as tidying the data by data scientists, is the process of addressing (perhaps perceived) issues or concerns that had been identified within data. These issues affect the use, quality, and outcome (performance) of a database or data model—data quality, of course, being relative to the proposed purpose of use (of the data, database, or data model).

Categorizing quality

Typically, issues with data quality may be categorized into one of the following areas:

  • Accuracy
  • Completeness
  • Update Status
  • Relevance
  • Consistency (across sources)
  • Reliability
  • Appropriateness
  • Accessibility

You'll find plenty of data quality categorizing overlap between statistical and non-statistical data. Sometimes, a data quality issue may appear to apply strictly to a particular genre—stat versus non-stat—but after further...