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

R and statistical regression


Before we jump right into our modeling, let's take a moment to validate the use of R as our statistical modeling tool.

R is an open-source statistical environment and a powerful programming language that continues to be one of the most popular choices for statistical modeling. Modeled after S and S-Plus, R has an ever-growing, widespread audience as is well maintained by the R core-development team (an international team of volunteer developers).

R and many related resources can easily be found online along with detailed directions for downloading the software, accompanying packages and other sources of documentation. In addition, there are a ton of specialized routines that have been written for R by people all over the world and made freely available as R packages.

Since R is a programming language, it brings the power of programming to your project, but it does require some expertise with the tool. Thankfully, it offers a graphical user interface (GUI) to make...