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 2: Essential Statistics for Data Assessment

In Chapter 1, Fundamentals of Data Collection, Cleaning, and Preprocessing, we learned about data collection, basic data imputation, outlier removal, and standardization. Hence, this will provide you with a good foundation to understand this chapter.

In this chapter, you are going to learn how to examine the essential statistics for data assessment. Essential statistics are also often referred to as descriptive statistics. Descriptive statistics provide simple, quantitative summaries of datasets, usually combined with descriptive graphics. For example, descriptive statistics can demonstrate the tendency of centralization or measures of the variability of features, and so on.

Descriptive statistics are important. Correctly represented descriptive statistics give you a precise summary of the datasets at your disposal. In this chapter, we will learn to extract information and make quantitative judgements from descriptive statistics...