The Thorns Remain

"Statistical methods are a key part of of data science, yet very few data scientists have any formal statistics training. Courses and books on basic statistics rarely cover the topic from a data science perspective. This practical guide explains how to apply various statistical methods to data science, tells you how to avoid their misuse, and gives you advice on what's important and what's not. Many data science resources incorporate statistical methods but lack a deeper statistical perspective. If you're familiar with the R programming language, and have some exposure to statistics, this quick reference bridges the gap in an accessible, readable format. With this book, you'll learn: Why exploratory data analysis is a key preliminary step in data science ; How random sampling can reduce bias and yield a higher quality dataset, even with big data ; How the principles of experimental design yield definitive answers to questions ; How to use regression to estimate outcomes and detect anomalies ; Key classification techniques for predicting which categories a record belongs to ; Statistical machine learning methods that 'learn' from data ; Unsupervised learning methods for extracting meaning from unlabeled data"--Provided by publisher This book is aimed at the data scientist with some familiarity with the R programming language, and with some prior (perhaps spotty or ephemeral) exposure to statistics. May 2017: First Edition Revision History for the First Edition 2017-05-09: First Release 2017-06-23: Second Release 2018-05-11: Third Release Peter Bruce And Andrew Bruce. Includes Bibliographical References And Index.