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 the concepts of parameter estimation and the features of estimators

A introduction to estimation theory requires a good mathematical understanding and careful derivation. Here, I am going to use layman's terms to give you a brief but adequate introduction so that we can move on to concrete examples quickly.

Estimation, in statistics, refers to the process of estimating unknown values from empirical data that involves random components. Sometimes, people confuse estimation with prediction. Estimation usually deals with hidden parameters that are embodied in a known dataset: things that already happened, while prediction tries to predict values that are explicitly not in the dataset: things that haven't happened. For example, estimating the population of the world 1,000 years ago is an estimation problem. You can use various kinds of data that may contain information about the population. The population is a number that will not change but is unknown. On the...