Book Image

Principles of Data Science - Third Edition

By : Sinan Ozdemir
Book Image

Principles of Data Science - Third Edition

By: Sinan Ozdemir

Overview of this book

Principles of Data Science bridges mathematics, programming, and business analysis, empowering you to confidently pose and address complex data questions and construct effective machine learning pipelines. This book will equip you with the tools to transform abstract concepts and raw statistics into actionable insights. Starting with cleaning and preparation, you’ll explore effective data mining strategies and techniques before moving on to building a holistic picture of how every piece of the data science puzzle fits together. Throughout the book, you’ll discover statistical models with which you can control and navigate even the densest or the sparsest of datasets and learn how to create powerful visualizations that communicate the stories hidden in your data. With a focus on application, this edition covers advanced transfer learning and pre-trained models for NLP and vision tasks. You’ll get to grips with advanced techniques for mitigating algorithmic bias in data as well as models and addressing model and data drift. Finally, you’ll explore medium-level data governance, including data provenance, privacy, and deletion request handling. By the end of this data science book, you'll have learned the fundamentals of computational mathematics and statistics, all while navigating the intricacies of modern ML and large pre-trained models like GPT and BERT.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)

Introducing ML

In Chapter 1, Data Science Terminology, we defined ML as giving computers the ability to learn from data without being given explicit rules by a programmer. This definition still holds true. ML is concerned with the ability to ascertain certain patterns (signals) out of data, even if the data has inherent errors in it (noise).

ML models are able to learn from data without the explicit direction of a human. That is the main difference between ML models and classical non-ML algorithms.

Classical algorithms are told directly by a human how to find the best answer in a complex system, and the algorithm then achieves these best solutions, often working faster and more efficiently than a human. However, the bottleneck here is that the human has to first come up with the best solution in order to tell the algorithm what to do. In ML, the model is not told the best solution and, instead, is given several examples of the problem and told to figure out the best solution...