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

Appreciating A/B testing with a real-world example

In the last section of this chapter, let's talk about A/B testing. Unlike previous topics, A/B testing is a very general concept. A/B testing is something of a geeky engineer's word for statistical hypothesis testing. At the most basic level, it simply means a way of finding out which setting or treatment performs better in a single-variable experiment. Most A/B testing can be classified as a simple Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT). What randomized control means will be clear soon.

Let's take a real-world example: a consulting company proposes a new working-hours schedule for a factory, claiming that the new schedule will improve the workers' efficiency as well as their satisfaction. The cost of abruptly shifting the working-hours schedule may be big and the factory does not want the risk involved. Therefore, the consulting company proposes an A/B test. Consultants propose selecting two groups of workers, group...