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

Summary

In this chapter, we discussed the most important plots in Python. Different plots suit different purposes, and you should choose them accordingly. The default settings of each plot may not be perfect for your needs, so customizations are necessary. You also learned the importance of choosing the right geometries and aesthetics to avoid problems in your dataset, such as significant quantity imbalance or highlighting features to make an exploratory argument.

Business queries are the starting point of designing a statistical plot. We discussed the necessity of transforming data to fit a function API and choosing proper plotting functions to answer queries without hassle.

In the next chapter, let's look at some probability distributions. After all, both the histogram plot and the density estimation plot in a joint plot try to uncover the probability distributions behind the dataset.