Principles of Data Science

Learn the techniques and math you need to start making sense of your data

About This Book

• Put data science theory into practice to power your organization
• More than just a math class, you'll learn how to perform real-world data science tasks with R and Python
• Create actionable insights and transform raw data into tangible value

You should be fairly well acquainted with basic algebra and should feel comfortable reading snippets of R/Python as well as pseudo code. You should have the urge to learn and apply the techniques put forth in this book on either your own data sets or those provided to you. If you have the basic maths skills but want to apply them in data science or you have good programming skills but lack math, then this book is for you.

What You Will Learn

• Get to know the 5 most important steps of data science
• Use your data intelligently and learn how to handle it with care
• Bridge the gap between mathematics and programming
• Learn about probability, calculus, and how to use statistical models to control and clean your data and drive actionable results
• Build and evaluate baseline machine learning models
• Explore the most effective metrics to determine the success of your machine learning models
• Create data visualizations that communicate actionable insights
• Read and apply machine learning concepts to your problems and make actual predictions

The Principles of Data Science is created to help you join the dots between mathematics, programming, and business analysis. With this book, you'll feel confident about asking—and answering—complex and sophisticated questions of your data to move from abstract and raw statistics to actionable ideas.

With a unique approach that bridges the gap between mathematics and computer science, you'll go on an exciting journey to becoming a data scientist. Taking you through the entire data science pipeline beginning with cleaning and preparing data, and providing effective data mining strategies and techniques, you'll begin to build a comprehensive picture of how every piece of the data science puzzle fits together. You will learn the fundamentals of computational mathematics and statistics using both R and Python, as well as some pseudocode being used today by data scientists and analysts. You'll get to grips with machine learning, get to know some useful statistical models that help you take control and navigate even the most dense datasets, and find out how to create powerful visualizations that communicate what your data means.

Data without insight is worthless—so make sure you're able to make the jump and link the gap between theory and practice!