Book Image

Clojure for Data Science

By : Garner
Book Image

Clojure for Data Science

By: Garner

Overview of this book

The term “data science” has been widely used to define this new profession that is expected to interpret vast datasets and translate them to improved decision-making and performance. Clojure is a powerful language that combines the interactivity of a scripting language with the speed of a compiled language. Together with its rich ecosystem of native libraries and an extremely simple and consistent functional approach to data manipulation, which maps closely to mathematical formula, it is an ideal, practical, and flexible language to meet a data scientist’s diverse needs. Taking you on a journey from simple summary statistics to sophisticated machine learning algorithms, this book shows how the Clojure programming language can be used to derive insights from data. Data scientists often forge a novel path, and you’ll see how to make use of Clojure’s Java interoperability capabilities to access libraries such as Mahout and Mllib for which Clojure wrappers don’t yet exist. Even seasoned Clojure developers will develop a deeper appreciation for their language’s flexibility! You’ll learn how to apply statistical thinking to your own data and use Clojure to explore, analyze, and visualize it in a technically and statistically robust way. You can also use Incanter for local data processing and ClojureScript to present interactive visualisations and understand how distributed platforms such as Hadoop sand Spark’s MapReduce and GraphX’s BSP solve the challenges of data analysis at scale, and how to explain algorithms using those programming models. Above all, by following the explanations in this book, you’ll learn not just how to be effective using the current state-of-the-art methods in data science, but why such methods work so that you can continue to be productive as the field evolves into the future.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
11
Index

Regression


While it may be useful to know that two variables are correlated, we can't use this information alone to predict the weights of Olympic swimmers given their height or vice versa. In establishing a correlation, we have measured the strength and sign of a relationship, but not the slope. Knowing the expected rate of change for one variable given a unit change in the other is required in order to make predictions.

What we'd like to determine is an equation that relates the specific value of one variable, called the independent variable, to the expected value of the other, the dependent variable. For example, if our linear equation predicts the weight given the height, then the height is our independent variable and the weight is our dependent variable.

Note

The lines described by these equations are called regression lines. The term was introduced by the 19th century British polymath Sir Francis Galton. He and his student Karl Pearson (who defined the correlation coefficient) developed...