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. Which four tasks should be undertaken during the Setup Phase?
  2. State two reasons why the Data Science Methodology does not follow the usual statistical inference paradigm.
  3. Describe what data dredging is and why data scientists need to avoid it.
  4. How do data scientists avoid data dredging?
  5. Describe the differences between the training data set and the test data set.
  6. When validating the partition, does the data scientist need to check every field?
  7. When validating a partition, which statistical test is used for a numerical variable?
  8. What is balancing? Why is it used?
  9. Describe what we mean by resampling.
  10. When should the test data set be balanced?
  11. Why is it important to establish baseline model performance?
  12. Describe the two baseline models for binary classification.
  13. True or false: there is no baseline model for k‐nary classification.
  14. What is the optimal benchmark for calibrating your model performance?

WORKING WITH THE DATA

For Exercises 15–...