Book Image

Essential Statistics for Non-STEM Data Analysts

By : Rongpeng Li
Book Image

Essential Statistics for Non-STEM Data Analysts

By: Rongpeng Li

Overview of this book

Statistics remain the backbone of modern analysis tasks, helping you to interpret the results produced by data science pipelines. This book is a detailed guide covering the math and various statistical methods required for undertaking data science tasks. The book starts by showing you how to preprocess data and inspect distributions and correlations from a statistical perspective. You’ll then get to grips with the fundamentals of statistical analysis and apply its concepts to real-world datasets. As you advance, you’ll find out how statistical concepts emerge from different stages of data science pipelines, understand the summary of datasets in the language of statistics, and use it to build a solid foundation for robust data products such as explanatory models and predictive models. Once you’ve uncovered the working mechanism of data science algorithms, you’ll cover essential concepts for efficient data collection, cleaning, mining, visualization, and analysis. Finally, you’ll implement statistical methods in key machine learning tasks such as classification, regression, tree-based methods, and ensemble learning. By the end of this Essential Statistics for Non-STEM Data Analysts book, you’ll have learned how to build and present a self-contained, statistics-backed data product to meet your business goals.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1: Getting Started with Statistics for Data Science
5
Section 2: Essentials of Statistical Analysis
10
Section 3: Statistics for Machine Learning
15
Section 4: Appendix

Chapter 8: Statistics for Regression

In this chapter, we are going to cover one of the most important techniques—and likely the most frequently used technique – in data science, which is regression.

Regression, in layman's terms, is to build or find relationships between variables, features, or any other entities. The word regression originates from the Latin regressus, which means a return. Usually, in a regression problem, you have two kinds of variables:

  • Independent variables, also referred to as features or predictors
  • Dependent variables, also known as response variables or outcome variables

Our goal is to try to find a relationship between dependent and independent variables.

Note

It is quite helpful to understand word origins or how the scientific community chose a name for a concept. It may not help you understand the concept directly, but it will help you memorize the concepts more vividly.

Regression can be used to explain...