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 5: Common Probability Distributions

In the previous chapter, we discussed the concepts of population and sampling. In most cases, it is not likely that you will find a dataset that perfectly obeys a well-defined distribution. However, common probability distributions are the backbone of data science and serve as the first approximation of real-world distributions.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

  • Understanding important concepts in probability
  • Understanding common discrete probability distributions
  • Understanding common continuous probability distributions
  • Learning about joint and conditional distribution
  • Understanding the power law and black swan

Recall the famous saying, there is nothing more practical than good theory. The theory of probability is beyond greatness. Let's get started!