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

Presentation-ready plotting tips

Here are some tips if you plan to use plots in your professional work.

Use styling

Consider using the following tips to style plots:

  • You should consider using a style that accommodates your PowerPoint or slides. For example, if your presentation contains a lot of grayscale elements, you shouldn't use colorful plots.
  • You should keep styling consistent across the presentation or report.
  • You should avoid using markups that are too fancy.
  • Be aware of the fact that sometimes people only have grayscale printing, so red and green may be indistinguishable. Use different markers and textures in this case.

For example, the following code replots the joint plot in grayscale style:

with plt.style.context('grayscale'):
    plt.figure(figsize=(12,6))
    g = sns.jointplot("R_NATURAL_INC_2017", "R_birth_2017", data=dfTX, kind="reg",height=10)
...