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

Non-tabular data

This is an elementary project. The knowledge points in this project can be found in Chapter 1, Fundamentals of Data Collection, Cleaning, and Preprocessing, and Chapter 2, Essential Statistics for Data Assessment.

The university dataset in the UCI machine learning repository is stored in a non-tabular format: https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/University. Please examine its format and perform the following tasks:

  1. Examine the data format visually and then write down some patterns to see whether such patterns can be used to extract the data at specific lines.
  2. Write a function that will systematically read the data file and store the data contained within in a pandas DataFrame.
  3. The data description mentioned the existence of both missing data and duplicate data. Identify the missing data and deduplicate the duplicated data.
  4. Classify the features into numerical features and categorical features.
  5. Apply min-max normalization to all the numerical...