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)

Understanding pre-trained models

Pre-trained models are like learning from the experience of others. These models have been trained on extensive datasets, learning patterns, and features that make them adept at their tasks. Think of it as if a model has been reading thousands of books on a subject, absorbing all that information. When we use a pre-trained model, we’re leveraging all that prior knowledge.

In general, pre-training steps are not necessarily “useful” to a human, but it is crucial to a model to simply learn about a domain and about a medium. Pre-training helps models learn how language works in general but not how to classify sentiments or detect an object.

Benefits of using pre-trained models

The benefits of using pre-trained models are numerous. For starters, they save us a lot of time. Training a model from scratch can be a time-consuming process, but using a pre-trained model gives us a head start. Furthermore, these models often lead to...