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

Using SciPy for common hypothesis testing

The previous section went over a t-test and the basic concepts in general hypothesis testing. In this section, we are going to fully embrace the powerful idea of the paradigm of hypothesis testing and use the SciPy library to solve various hypothesis testing problems.

The paradigm

The powerful idea behind the hypothesis testing paradigm is that if you know that your assumption when hypothesis testing is (roughly) satisfied, you can just invoke a well-written function and examine the P-value to interpret the results.

Tip

I encourage you to understand why a test statistic is built in a specific way and why it follows a specific distribution. For example, for the t-distribution, you should understand what the DOF is. However, this will require a deeper understanding of mathematical statistics. If you just want to use hypothesis testing to gain insights, knowing the paradigm is enough.

If you want to apply hypothesis testing...