Book Image

Principles of Data Science

Book Image

Principles of Data Science

Overview of this book

Need to turn your skills at programming into effective data science skills? Principles of Data Science is created to help you join the dots between mathematics, programming, and business analysis. With this book, you’ll feel confident about asking—and answering—complex and sophisticated questions of your data to move from abstract and raw statistics to actionable ideas. With a unique approach that bridges the gap between mathematics and computer science, this books takes you through the entire data science pipeline. Beginning with cleaning and preparing data, and effective data mining strategies and techniques, you’ll move on to build a comprehensive picture of how every piece of the data science puzzle fits together. Learn the fundamentals of computational mathematics and statistics, as well as some pseudocode being used today by data scientists and analysts. You’ll get to grips with machine learning, discover the statistical models that help you take control and navigate even the densest datasets, and find out how to create powerful visualizations that communicate what your data means.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Principles of Data Science
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Neural networks


Probably one of the most talked about machine learning models, neural networks are computational networks built to model animals' nervous systems. Before getting too deep into the structure, let's take a look at the big advantages of neural networks.

The key component of neural networks is that it is not only a complex structure, it is a complex and flexible structure. This means the following two things:

  • Neural networks are able to estimate any function shape (this is called being non-parametric)

  • Neural networks can adapt and literally change their own internal structure based on their environment

Basic structure

Neural networks are made up of interconnected nodes (perceptrons) that each take in input (quantitative value), and output other quantitative values. Signals travel through the network and eventually end up at a prediction node.

Visualization of neural network interconnected nodes

Another huge advantage of neural networks is that they can be used for supervised learning...