Book Image

Statistics for Data Science

Book Image

Statistics for Data Science

Overview of this book

Data science is an ever-evolving field, which is growing in popularity at an exponential rate. Data science includes techniques and theories extracted from the fields of statistics; computer science, and, most importantly, machine learning, databases, data visualization, and so on. This book takes you through an entire journey of statistics, from knowing very little to becoming comfortable in using various statistical methods for data science tasks. It starts off with simple statistics and then move on to statistical methods that are used in data science algorithms. The R programs for statistical computation are clearly explained along with logic. You will come across various mathematical concepts, such as variance, standard deviation, probability, matrix calculations, and more. You will learn only what is required to implement statistics in data science tasks such as data cleaning, mining, and analysis. You will learn the statistical techniques required to perform tasks such as linear regression, regularization, model assessment, boosting, SVMs, and working with neural networks. By the end of the book, you will be comfortable with performing various statistical computations for data science programmatically.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Data analysis


Let's start by looking at what is known as data analysis. This is defined as a structured process undertaken to evaluate data using analytical and logical reasoning. One performs data analysis by taking the time to gather up all the data to be analyzed, breaking that data (now viewed as a data source) into chunks or components (that can be reviewed), and then drawing a conclusion based upon what is seen or found within the data. Typically, this is done in an effort to determine that a data source is useable for meeting a declared project deliverable.

There are a variety of specific data analysis approaches, some of which include data mining (discussed in Chapter 4, Data Mining and the Database Developer), text analytics, business intelligence, and data visualizations (just to name a few of them).

To a data developer, data analysis involves inspecting the individual parts of a data source with an intention in mind.

For example, suppose we have some transactional data collected...