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

Classifying numerical and categorical variables

Descriptive statistics are all about variables. You must know what you are describing to define corresponding descriptive statistics.

A variable is also referred to as a feature or attribute in other literature. They all mean the same thing: a single column in a tabulated dataset.

In this section, you will examine the two most important variable types, numerical and categorical, and learn to distinguish between them. Categorical variables are discrete and usually represent a classification property of entry. Numerical variables are continuous and descriptive quantitatively. Descriptive statistics that can be applied to one kind of variable may not be applied to another one, hence distinguishing between them precedes analytics.

Distinguishing between numerical and categorical variables

In order to understand the differences between the two types of variables with the help of an example, I will be using the population estimates...