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)

Confidence intervals

While point estimates are okay, estimates of a population parameter and sampling distributions are even better. There are the following two main issues with these approaches:

  • Single point estimates are very prone to error (due to sampling bias among other things)
  • Taking multiple samples of a certain size for sampling distributions might not be feasible, and may sometimes be even more infeasible than actually finding the population parameter

For these reasons and more, we may turn to a concept known as the confidence interval to find statistics.

A confidence interval is a range of values based on a point estimate that contains the true population parameter at some confidence level.

Confidence is an important concept in advanced statistics. Its meaning is sometimes misconstrued. Informally, a confidence level does not represent a probability of being correct; instead, it represents the frequency at which the obtained answer will be accurate...