Book Image

Applying Math with Python - Second Edition

By : Sam Morley
Book Image

Applying Math with Python - Second Edition

By: Sam Morley

Overview of this book

The updated edition of Applying Math with Python will help you solve complex problems in a wide variety of mathematical fields in simple and efficient ways. Old recipes have been revised for new libraries and several recipes have been added to demonstrate new tools such as JAX. You'll start by refreshing your knowledge of several core mathematical fields and learn about packages covered in Python's scientific stack, including NumPy, SciPy, and Matplotlib. As you progress, you'll gradually get to grips with more advanced topics of calculus, probability, and networks (graph theory). Once you’ve developed a solid base in these topics, you’ll have the confidence to set out on math adventures with Python as you explore Python's applications in data science and statistics, forecasting, geometry, and optimization. The final chapters will take you through a collection of miscellaneous problems, including working with specific data formats and accelerating code. By the end of this book, you'll have an arsenal of practical coding solutions that can be used and modified to solve a wide range of practical problems in computational mathematics and data science.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Understanding a population using sampling

One of the central problems in statistics is to make estimations – and quantify how good these estimations are – of the distribution of an entire population given only a small (random) sample. A classic example is to estimate the average height of all the people in a country when measuring the height of a randomly selected sample of people. These kinds of problems are particularly interesting when the true population distribution, by which we usually mean the mean of the whole population, cannot feasibly be measured. In this case, we must rely on our knowledge of statistics and a (usually much smaller) randomly selected sample to estimate the true population mean and standard deviation, and also quantify how good our estimations are. It is the latter that is the source of confusion, misunderstanding, and misrepresentation of statistics in the wider world.

In this recipe, we will learn how to estimate the population mean and...