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 9: Statistics for Classification

In the previous chapter, we covered regression problems where correlations, in the form of a numerical relationship between independent variables and dependent variables, are established.

Different from regression problems, classification problems aim to predict the categorical dependent variable from independent variables. For example, with the same Netflix stock price data and other potential data, we can build a model to use historical data that predicts whether the stock price will rise or fall after a fixed amount of time. In this case, the dependent variable is binary: rise or fall (let's ignore the possibility of having the same value for simplicity). Therefore, this is a typical binary classification problem. We will look at similar problems in this chapter.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Understanding how a logistic regression classifier works
  • Learning how to evaluate the performance of...