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

Real-time weather data

This is a comprehensive project. The knowledge points are mainly from Chapter 1, Fundamentals of Data Collection, Cleaning, and Preprocessing, and Chapter 3, Visualization with Statistical Graphs.

The free weather API provides current weather data for more than 200,000 cities in the world. You can apply for a free trial here: https://openweathermap.org/api. In this example, you will build a visualization of the temperature for major US cities. Refer to the following instructions:

  1. Read the API documentation for the current endpoint: https://openweathermap.org/current. Write some short scripts to test the validity of your API key by querying the current weather in New York. If you don't have one, apply for a free trial.
  2. Write another function that will parse the returned data into tabular format.
  3. Query the current weather in Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, and Denver as well. You may want to store their zip codes in a dictionary for reference...