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 how a logistic regression classifier works

Although this section name sounds a bit unheard, it is correct. Logistic regression is indeed a regression model, but it is mostly used for classification tasks. A classifier is a model that contains sets of rules or formulas (sometimes millions or more) to perform the classification task. In a simple logistic regression classifier, we only need one rule built on a single feature to perform the classification.

Logistic regression is very popular in both traditional statistics as well as machine learning.

The name logistic originates from the name of the function used in logistic regression: logistic function. Logistic regression is the Generalized Linear Model (GLM). The GLM is not a single model, but an extended group of models of Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) models. Roughly speaking, the linear part of the model in GLM is similar to OLS, but various kinds of transformation and interpretations are introduced, so GLM models...