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

Preface

Data science has been trending for several years, and demand in the market is now really on the increase as companies, governments, and non-profit organizations have shifted toward a data-driven approach.

Many new graduates, as well as people who have been working for years, are now trying to add data science as a new skill to their resumes. One significant barrier for stepping into the realm of data science is statistics, especially for people who do not have a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) background or left the classroom years ago. This book is designed to fill the gap for those people. While writing this book, I tried to explore the scattered concepts in a dot-connecting fashion such that readers feel that new concepts and techniques are needed rather than simply being created from thin air.

By the end of this book, you will be able to comfortably deal with common statistical concepts and computation in data science, from fundamental descriptive statistics and inferential statistics to advanced topics, such as statistics using tree-based methods and ensemble methods. This book is also particularly handy if you are preparing for a data scientist or data analyst job interview. The nice interleaving of conceptual contents and code examples will prepare you well.