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)

Sources of algorithmic bias

ML models, grounded in the learnings from past data, may unintentionally propagate bias present in their training datasets. Recognizing the roots of this bias is a vital first step toward fairer models:

  • One such source is historical bias. This form of bias mirrors existing prejudices and systemic inequalities present in society. An example would be a recruitment model trained on a company’s past hiring data. If the organization historically favored a specific group for certain roles, the model could replicate these biases, continuing the cycle of bias.
  • Representation or sample bias is another significant contributor. It occurs when certain groups are over- or underrepresented in the training data. For instance, training a facial recognition model predominantly on images of light-skinned individuals may cause the model to perform poorly when identifying faces with darker skin tones, favoring one group over the other.
  • Proxy bias is when...