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

Understanding fundamental concepts in sampling techniques

In Chapter 2, Essential Statistics for Data Assessment, I emphasized that statistics such as mean and variance were used to describe the population. The intent is to help you distinguish between the population and samples. With a population at hand, the information is complete, which means all statistics you calculated will be authentic since you have everything. With a sample, the information you have only relates to a small portion, or a subset of the population.

What exactly is a population?

A population is the whole set of entities under study. If you want to study the average monthly income of all American women, then the population includes every woman in the United States. Population will change if the study or the question changes. If the study is about finding the average monthly income of all Los Angeles women, then a subset of the population for the previous study becomes the whole population of the current...