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

Summary

This chapter was an intense one. Congratulations on finishing it!

First, we covered the concept of the hypothesis, including the basic concepts of hypotheses, such as the null hypothesis, the alternative hypothesis, and the P-value. I spent quite a bit of time going over example content to ensure that you understood the concept of the P-value and significance levels correctly.

Next, we looked at the paradigm of hypothesis testing and used corresponding library functions to do testing on various scenarios. We also covered the ANOVA test and testing on time series.

Toward the end, we briefly covered A/B testing. We demonstrated the idea with a classic click rate example and also pointed out some common mistakes.

One additional takeaway for this chapter is that in many cases, new knowledge is needed to understand how a task is done in unfamiliar fields. For example, if you were not familiar with time series before reading this chapter, now you should know how to use...