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

Having hands-on experience with multivariate linear regression and collinearity analysis

Simple linear regression is rarely useful because, in reality, many factors will contribute to certain outcomes. We want to increase the complexity of our model to capture more sophisticated one-to-many relationships. In this section, we'll study multivariate linear regression and collinearity analysis.

First, we want to add more terms into the equation as follows:

There is no non-linear term and there are independent variables that contribute to the dependent variable collectively. For example, people's wages can be a dependent variable and their age and number of employment years can be good explanatory/independent variables.

Note on multiple regression and multivariate regression

You may see interchangeable usage of multiple linear regression and multivariate linear regression. Strictly speaking, they are different. Multiple linear regression means that there are multiple...