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 10: Statistics for Tree-Based Methods

In the previous chapter, we covered some important concepts in classification models. We also built a naïve Bayes classifier from scratch, which is very important because it requires you to understand every aspect of the details.

In this chapter, we are going to dive into another family of statistical models that are also widely used in statistical analysis as well as machine learning: tree-based models. Tree-based models can be used for both classification tasks and regression tasks.

By the end of this chapter, you will have achieved the following:

  • Gained an overview of tree-based classification
  • Understood the details of classification tree building
  • Understood the mechanisms of regression trees
  • Know how to use the scikit-learn library to build and regularize a tree-based method

Let's get started! All the code snippets used in this chapter can be found in the official GitHub repository here: https...