Book Image

Data Science Using Python and R

By : Chantal D. Larose, Daniel T. Larose
Book Image

Data Science Using Python and R

By: Chantal D. Larose, Daniel T. Larose

Overview of this book

Data science is hot. Bloomberg named a data scientist as the ‘hottest job in America’. Python and R are the top two open-source data science tools using which you can produce hands-on solutions to real-world business problems, using state-of-the-art techniques. Each chapter in the book presents step-by-step instructions and walkthroughs for solving data science problems using Python and R. You’ll learn how to prepare data, perform exploratory data analysis, and prepare to model the data. As you progress, you’ll explore what are decision trees and how to use them. You’ll also learn about model evaluation, misclassification costs, naïve Bayes classification, and neural networks. The later chapters provide comprehensive information about clustering, regression modeling, dimension reduction, and association rules mining. The book also throws light on exciting new topics, such as random forests and general linear models. The book emphasizes data-driven error costs to enhance profitability, which avoids the common pitfalls that may cost a company millions of dollars. By the end of this book, you’ll have enough knowledge and confidence to start providing solutions to data science problems using R and Python.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
17
INDEX
18
END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT

EXERCISES

CLARIFYING THE CONCEPTS

  1. Explain what clustering is trying to accomplish, using the concepts of between‐cluster variation and within‐cluster variation.
  2. Which, records or variables, does clustering seek to group?
  3. Why is it helpful to apply clustering fairly early in the modeling process?
  4. True or false: k‐means clustering automatically selects the optimal number of clusters.
  5. Why do we omit the target variable as an input to the clustering algorithm?
  6. Explain how we proceed to perform cluster validation.
  7. Why do we standardize the numerical predictors prior to clustering?
  8. What is perhaps the most important cluster validation method?
  9. What is the centroid of the points (1, 5), (2, 4), and (3, 3)?
  10. Provide an example of clustering in the everyday world that is not discussed in this chapter.

WORKING WITH THE DATA

For the following exercises, work with the white_wine_training and white_wine_test data sets. Use either Python or R to solve each problem.

  1. Input and...