Now that we've fully covered introductory inferential statistics, we're now going to shift our attention to one of the most exciting and practically useful topics in data analysis: predictive analytics. Throughout this chapter, we are going to introduce concepts and terminology from a closely related field called statistical learning or, as it's more commonly referred to, machine learning.
Whereas in the last unit we were using data to make inferences about the world, this unit is primarily about using data to make inferences (or predictions) about other data. On the surface, this might not sound more appealing, but consider the fruits of this area of study: if you've ever received a call from your credit card company asking to confirm a suspicious purchase that you, in fact, did not make, it's because sophisticated algorithms learned your purchasing behavior and were able to detect deviation from that pattern.
Since this is the first chapter leaving...