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

Avoiding the use of misleading graphs

Graphics convey much more information than words. Not everyone understands P-values or statistical arguments, but almost everyone can tell if one piece of a pie plot is larger than another piece of pie plot, or if two-line plots share a similar trend. However, there are many ways in which graphs can also damage the quality of a visualization or mislead readers.

In this section, we will examine two examples. Let's start with the first example – misleading graphs.

Example 1 – COVID-19 trend

The following graph is a screenshot taken in early April 2020. A news channel showed this graph of new COVID-19 cases per day in the United States. Do you spot anything strange?

Figure 12.2 – A screenshot of COVID-19 coverage of a news channel

The issue is on the y axis. If you look closely, the y axis tickers are not separated equally but in a strange pattern. For example, the space between 30 and 60...