Book Image

Learning Predictive Analytics with Python

By : Ashish Kumar, Gary Dougan
Book Image

Learning Predictive Analytics with Python

By: Ashish Kumar, Gary Dougan

Overview of this book

Social Media and the Internet of Things have resulted in an avalanche of data. Data is powerful but not in its raw form - It needs to be processed and modeled, and Python is one of the most robust tools out there to do so. It has an array of packages for predictive modeling and a suite of IDEs to choose from. Learning to predict who would win, lose, buy, lie, or die with Python is an indispensable skill set to have in this data age. This book is your guide to getting started with Predictive Analytics using Python. You will see how to process data and make predictive models from it. We balance both statistical and mathematical concepts, and implement them in Python using libraries such as pandas, scikit-learn, and numpy. You’ll start by getting an understanding of the basics of predictive modeling, then you will see how to cleanse your data of impurities and get it ready it for predictive modeling. You will also learn more about the best predictive modeling algorithms such as Linear Regression, Decision Trees, and Logistic Regression. Finally, you will see the best practices in predictive modeling, as well as the different applications of predictive modeling in the modern world.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Learning Predictive Analytics with Python
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
A List of Links
Index

Summary


In this chapter, we skimmed through the basic concepts of statistics. Here is a brief summary of the concepts we learned:

  • Hypothesis testing is used to test the statistical significance of a hypothesis. The one which already exists or is assumed to be true is a null hypothesis, the one which someone is not sure about or is being proposed as an alternate premise is an alternate hypothesis.

  • One needs to calculate a statistic and the associated p-value to conduct the test.

  • Hypothesis testing (p-values) is used to test the significance of the estimates of the coefficients calculated by the model.

  • The chi-square test is used to test the causal relationship between a predictor and an input variable. It can also be used to check whether the data is fair or fake.

  • The correlation coefficient can range from -1 to 1. The closer it is to the extremes, the stronger is the relationship between the two variables.

Linear regression is part of the family of algorithms called supervised algorithms as the...