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

Understanding a simple linear regression model and its rich content

Simple linear regression is the simplest regression model. You only have two variables: one dependent variable, usually denoted by y, and an independent variable, usually denoted by x. The relationship is linear, so the model only contains two parameters. The relationship can be formulated with the following formula:

k is the slope and b is the intercept. Є is the noise term.

Note

Proportionality is different from linearity. Proportionality implies linearity and it is a stronger requirement that b must be 0 in the formula. Linearity, graphically, means that the relationship between two variables can be represented as a straight, but strict mathematical requirement of additivity and homogeneity. If a relationship (function f) is linear, then for any input x1 and x2 and scaler k, we must have the following equations: and .

Here is the code snippet that utilizes the yfinance library to obtain Netflix...