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

Further reading

With that, you have reached the last part of this book. In this section, I am going to recommend some of the best books on data science, statistics, and machine learning I've found, all of which can act as companions to this book. I have grouped them into categories and shared my personal thoughts on them.

Textbooks

Books that fall into this category are read like textbooks and are often used as textbooks or at least reference books in universities. Their quality has been proven and their value is timeless.

The first one is Statistical Inference by George Casella, 2nd Edition, which book covers the first several chapters of this book. It contains a multitude of useful exercises and practices, all of which are explained in detail. It is hard to get lost when reading this book.

The second book is The Elements of Statistical Learning by Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani, and Jerome Friedman, 2nd Edition. This book is the bible of traditional statistical...