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

An overview of hypothesis testing

To begin with the overview, I would like to share an ongoing example from while I was writing this book. As the coronavirus spread throughout the world, pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies worked around the clock to develop drugs and vaccines. Scientists estimated that it would take at least a year for a vaccine to be available. To verify the effectiveness and safety of a vaccine or drug, clinical trials needed to be done cautiously and thoroughly at different stages. It is a well-known fact that most drugs and vaccines won't reach the later trial stages and only a handful of them ultimately reach the market. How do clinical trials work? In short, the process of screening medicines is a process of hypothesis testing.

A hypothesis is just a statement or claim about the statistics or parameters describing a studied population. In clinical trials, the hypothesis that a medicine is effective or safe is being tested. The simplest scenario...