The data science handbook / Field Cady.

By: Cady, Field, 1984- [author.]
Language: English Publisher: Hoboken, NJ : Wiley, 2017Description: xviii, 396 pages : illustrations ; 25 cmContent type: text Media type: unmediated Carrier type: volumeISBN: 9781119092940 (cloth)Subject(s): Databases -- Handbooks, manuals, etc | Statistics -- Data processing -- Handbooks, manuals, etc | Big data -- Handbooks, manuals, etc | Information theory -- Handbooks, manuals, etcDDC classification: 005.74 LOC classification: QA76.9.D32 | C33 2017
Contents:
Table of Contents Preface xvii 1 Introduction: Becoming a Unicorn 1 1.1 Aren?t Data Scientists Just Overpaid Statisticians? 2 1.2 How Is This Book Organized? 3 1.3 How to Use This Book? 3 1.4 Why Is It All in Python, Anyway? 4 1.5 Example Code and Datasets 4 1.6 Parting Words 5 Part I The Stuff You?ll Always Use 7 2 The Data Science Road Map 9 2.1 Frame the Problem 10 2.2 Understand the Data: Basic Questions 11 2.3 Understand the Data: Data Wrangling 12 2.4 Understand the Data: Exploratory Analysis 13 2.5 Extract Features 14 2.6 Model 15 2.7 Present Results 15 2.8 Deploy Code 16 2.9 Iterating 16 2.10 Glossary 17 3 Programming Languages 19 3.1 Why Use a Programming Language? What Are the Other Options? 19 3.2 A Survey of Programming Languages for Data Science 20 3.3 Python Crash Course 22 3.4 Strings 27 3.5 Defining Functions 32 3.6 Python?s Technical Libraries 37 3.7 Other Python Resources 42 3.8 Further Reading 42 3.9 Glossary 43 3a Interlude: My Personal Toolkit 45 4 Data Munging: String Manipulation, Regular Expressions, and Data Cleaning 47 4.1 The Worst Dataset in the World 48 4.2 How to Identify Pathologies 48 4.3 Problems with Data Content 49 4.4 Formatting Issues 51 4.5 Example Formatting Script 54 4.6 Regular Expressions 55 4.7 Life in the Trenches 60 4.8 Glossary 60 5 Visualizations and Simple Metrics 61 5.1 A Note on Python?s Visualization Tools 62 5.2 Example Code 62 5.3 Pie Charts 63 5.4 Bar Charts 65 5.5 Histograms 66 5.6 Means, Standard Deviations, Medians, and Quantiles 69 5.7 Boxplots 70 5.8 Scatterplots 72 5.9 Scatterplots with Logarithmic Axes 74 5.10 Scatter Matrices 76 5.11 Heatmaps 77 5.12 Correlations 78 5.13 Anscombe?s Quartet and the Limits of Numbers 80 5.14 Time Series 80 5.15 Further Reading 85 5.16 Glossary 85 6 Machine Learning Overview 87 6.1 Historical Context 88 6.2 Supervised versus Unsupervised 89 6.3 Training Data, Testing Data, and the Great Boogeyman of Overfitting 89 6.4 Further Reading 91 6.5 Glossary 91 7 Interlude: Feature Extraction Ideas 93 7.1 Standard Features 93 7.2 Features That Involve Grouping 94 7.3 Preview of More Sophisticated Features 95 7.4 Defining the Feature You Want to Predict 95 8 Machine Learning Classification 97 8.1 What Is a Classifier, and What Can You Do with It? 97 8.2 A Few Practical Concerns 98 8.3 Binary versus Multiclass 99 8.4 Example Script 99 8.5 Specific Classifiers 101 8.6 Evaluating Classifiers 114 8.7 Selecting Classification Cutoffs 117 8.8 Further Reading 119 8.9 Glossary 119 9 Technical Communication and Documentation 121 9.1 Several Guiding Principles 122 9.2 Slide Decks 124 9.3 Written Reports 128 9.4 Speaking: What Has Worked for Me 130 9.5 Code Documentation 131 9.6 Further Reading 132 9.7 Glossary 132 Part II Stuff You Still Need to Know 133 10 Unsupervised Learning: Clustering and Dimensionality Reduction 135 10.1 The Curse of Dimensionality 136 10.2 Example: Eigenfaces for Dimensionality Reduction 138 10.3 Principal Component Analysis and Factor Analysis 140 10.4 Skree Plots and Understanding Dimensionality 142 10.5 Factor Analysis 143 10.6 Limitations of PCA 143 10.7 Clustering 144 10.8 Further Reading 151 10.9 Glossary 151 11 Regression 153 11.1 Example: Predicting Diabetes Progression 153 11.2 Least Squares 156 11.3 Fitting Nonlinear Curves 157 11.4 Goodness of Fit: R2 and Correlation 159 11.5 Correlation of Residuals 160 11.6 Linear Regression 161 11.7 LASSO Regression and Feature Selection 162 11.8 Further Reading 164 11.9 Glossary 164 12 Data Encodings and File Formats 165 12.1 Typical File Format Categories 165 12.2 CSV Files 167 12.3 JSON Files 168 12.4 XML Files 170 12.5 HTML Files 172 12.6 Tar Files 174 12.7 GZip Files 175 12.8 Zip Files 175 12.9 Image Files: Rasterized, Vectorized, and/or Compressed 176 12.10 It?s All Bytes at the End of the Day 177 12.11 Integers 178 12.12 Floats 179 12.13 Text Data 180 12.14 Further Reading 183 12.15 Glossary 183 13 Big Data 185 13.1 What Is Big Data? 185 13.2 Hadoop: The File System and the Processor 187 13.3 Using HDFS 188 13.4 Example PySpark Script 189 13.5 Spark Overview 190 13.6 Spark Operations 192 13.7 Two Ways to Run PySpark 193 13.8 Configuring Spark 194 13.9 Under the Hood 195 13.10 Spark Tips and Gotchas 196 13.11 The MapReduce Paradigm 197 13.12 Performance Considerations 199 13.13 Further Reading 200 13.14 Glossary 200 14 Databases 203 14.1 Relational Databases and MySQL 204 14.2 Key-Value Stores 210 14.3 Wide Column Stores 211 14.4 Document Stores 211 14.5 Further Reading 214 14.6 Glossary 214 15 Software Engineering Best Practices 217 15.1 Coding Style 217 15.2 Version Control and Git for Data Scientists 220 15.3 Testing Code 222 15.4 Test-Driven Development 225 15.5 AGILE Methodology 225 15.6 Further Reading 226 15.7 Glossary 226 16 Natural Language Processing 229 16.1 Do I Even Need NLP? 229 16.2 The Great Divide: Language versus Statistics 230 16.3 Example: Sentiment Analysis on Stock Market Articles 230 16.4 Software and Datasets 232 16.5 Tokenization 233 16.6 Central Concept: Bag‐of‐Words 233 16.7 Word Weighting: TF‐IDF 235 16.8 n‐Grams 235 16.9 Stop Words 236 16.10 Lemmatization and Stemming 236 16.11 Synonyms 237 16.12 Part of Speech Tagging 237 16.13 Common Problems 238 16.14 Advanced NLP: Syntax Trees, Knowledge, and Understanding 240 16.15 Further Reading 241 16.16 Glossary 242 17 Time Series Analysis 243 17.1 Example: Predicting Wikipedia Page Views 244 17.2 A Typical Workflow 247 17.3 Time Series versus Time-Stamped Events 248 17.4 Resampling an Interpolation 249 17.5 Smoothing Signals 251 17.6 Logarithms and Other Transformations 252 17.7 Trends and Periodicity 252 17.8 Windowing 253 17.9 Brainstorming Simple Features 254 17.10 Better Features: Time Series as Vectors 255 17.11 Fourier Analysis: Sometimes a Magic Bullet 256 17.12 Time Series in Context: The Whole Suite of Features 259 17.13 Further Reading 259 17.14 Glossary 260 18 Probability 261 18.1 Flipping Coins: Bernoulli Random Variables 261 18.2 Throwing Darts: Uniform Random Variables 263 18.3 The Uniform Distribution and Pseudorandom Numbers 263 18.4 Nondiscrete, Noncontinuous Random Variables 265 18.5 Notation, Expectations, and Standard Deviation 267 18.6 Dependence, Marginal and Conditional Probability 268 18.7 Understanding the Tails 269 18.8 Binomial Distribution 271 18.9 Poisson Distribution 272 18.10 Normal Distribution 272 18.11 Multivariate Gaussian 273 18.12 Exponential Distribution 274 18.13 Log-Normal Distribution 276 18.14 Entropy 277 18.15 Further Reading 279 18.16 Glossary 279 19 Statistics 281 19.1 Statistics in Perspective 281 19.2 Bayesian versus Frequentist: Practical Tradeoffs and Differing Philosophies 282 19.3 Hypothesis Testing: Key Idea and Example 283 19.4 Multiple Hypothesis Testing 285 19.5 Parameter Estimation 286 19.6 Hypothesis Testing: t-Test 287 19.7 Confidence Intervals 290 19.8 Bayesian Statistics 291 19.9 Naive Bayesian Statistics 293 19.10 Bayesian Networks 293 19.11 Choosing Priors: Maximum Entropy or Domain Knowledge 294 19.12 Further Reading 295 19.13 Glossary 295 20 Programming Language Concepts 297 20.1 Programming Paradigms 297 20.2 Compilation and Interpretation 305 20.3 Type Systems 307 20.4 Further Reading 309 20.5 Glossary 309 21 Performance and Computer Memory 311 21.1 Example Script 311 21.2 Algorithm Performance and Big‐O Notation 314 21.3 Some Classic Problems: Sorting a List and Binary Search 315 21.4 Amortized Performance and Average Performance 318 21.5 Two Principles: Reducing Overhead and Managing Memory 320 21.6 Performance Tip: Use Numerical Libraries When Applicable 322 21.7 Performance Tip: Delete Large Structures You Don?t Need 323 21.8 Performance Tip: Use Built‐In Functions When Possible 324 21.9 Performance Tip: Avoid Superfluous Function Calls 324 21.10 Performance Tip: Avoid Creating Large New Objects 325 21.11 Further Reading 325 21.12 Glossary 325 Part III Specialized or Advanced Topics 327 22 Computer Memory and Data Structures 329 22.1 Virtual Memory, the Stack, and the Heap 329 22.2 Example C Program 330 22.3 Data Types and Arrays in Memory 330 22.4 Structs 332 22.5 Pointers, the Stack, and the Heap 333 22.6 Key Data Structures 337 22.7 Further Reading 343 22.8 Glossary 343 23 Maximum Likelihood Estimation and Optimization 345 23.1 Maximum Likelihood Estimation 345 23.2 A Simple Example: Fitting a Line 346 23.3 Another Example: Logistic Regression 348 23.4 Optimization 348 23.5 Gradient Descent and Convex Optimization 350 23.6 Convex Optimization 353 23.7 Stochastic Gradient Descent 355 23.8 Further Reading 355 23.9 Glossary 356 24 Advanced Classifiers 357 24.1 A Note on Libraries 358 24.2 Basic Deep Learning 358 24.3 Convolutional Neural Networks 361 24.4 Different Types of Layers. What the Heck Is a Tensor? 362 24.5 Example: The MNIST Handwriting Dataset 363 24.6 Recurrent Neural Networks 366 24.7 Bayesian Networks 367 24.8 Training and Prediction 369 24.9 Markov Chain Monte Carlo 369 24.10 PyMC Example 370 24.11 Further Reading 373 24.12 Glossary 373 25 Stochastic Modeling 375 25.1 Markov Chains 375 25.2 Two Kinds of Markov Chain, Two Kinds of Questions 377 25.3 Markov Chain Monte Carlo 379 25.4 Hidden Markov Models and the Viterbi Algorithm 380 25.5 The Viterbi Algorithm 382 25.6 Random Walks 384 25.7 Brownian Motion 384 25.8 ARIMA Models 385 25.9 Continuous‐Time Markov Processes 386 25.10 Poisson Processes 387 25.11 Further Reading 388 25.12 Glossary 388 25a Parting Words: Your Future as a Data Scientist 391 Index 393
Summary: A comprehensive overview of data science covering the analytics, programming, and business skills necessary to master the discipline Finding a good data scientist has been likened to hunting for a unicorn: the required combination of technical skills is simply very hard to find in one person. In addition, good data science is not just rote application of trainable skill sets; it requires the ability to think flexibly about all these areas and understand the connections between them. This book provides a crash course in data science, combining all the necessary skills into a unified discipline. Unlike many analytics books, computer science and software engineering are given extensive coverage since they play such a central role in the daily work of a data scientist. The author also describes classic machine learning algorithms, from their mathematical foundations to real-world applications. Visualization tools are reviewed, and their central importance in data science is highlighted. Classical statistics is addressed to help readers think critically about the interpretation of data and its common pitfalls. The clear communication of technical results, which is perhaps the most undertrained of data science skills, is given its own chapter, and all topics are explained in the context of solving real-world data problems. The book also features: ? Extensive sample code and tutorials using Python? along with its technical libraries ? Core technologies of ?Big Data,? including their strengths and limitations and how they can be used to solve real-world problems ? Coverage of the practical realities of the tools, keeping theory to a minimum; however, when theory is presented, it is done in an intuitive way to encourage critical thinking and creativity ? A wide variety of case studies from industry ? Practical advice on the realities of being a data scientist today, including the overall workflow, where time is spent, the types of datasets worked on, and the skill sets needed The Data Science Handbook is an ideal resource for data analysis methodology and big data software tools. The book is appropriate for people who want to practice data science, but lack the required skill sets. This includes software professionals who need to better understand analytics and statisticians who need to understand software. Modern data science is a unified discipline, and it is presented as such. This book is also an appropriate reference for researchers and entry-level graduate students who need to learn real-world analytics and expand their skill set.
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GENERAL REFERENCE 		005.74 C1158 2017 (Browse shelf) Available CITU-CL-48019
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FIELD CADY is the data scientist at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, where he develops tools that use machine learning to mine scientific literature. He has also worked at Google and several Big Data startups. He has a BS in physics and math from Stanford University, and an MS in computer science from Carnegie Mellon.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Table of Contents

Preface xvii

1 Introduction: Becoming a Unicorn 1

1.1 Aren?t Data Scientists Just Overpaid Statisticians? 2

1.2 How Is This Book Organized? 3

1.3 How to Use This Book? 3

1.4 Why Is It All in Python, Anyway? 4

1.5 Example Code and Datasets 4

1.6 Parting Words 5

Part I The Stuff You?ll Always Use 7

2 The Data Science Road Map 9

2.1 Frame the Problem 10

2.2 Understand the Data: Basic Questions 11

2.3 Understand the Data: Data Wrangling 12

2.4 Understand the Data: Exploratory Analysis 13

2.5 Extract Features 14

2.6 Model 15

2.7 Present Results 15

2.8 Deploy Code 16

2.9 Iterating 16

2.10 Glossary 17

3 Programming Languages 19

3.1 Why Use a Programming Language? What Are the Other Options? 19

3.2 A Survey of Programming Languages for Data Science 20

3.3 Python Crash Course 22

3.4 Strings 27

3.5 Defining Functions 32

3.6 Python?s Technical Libraries 37

3.7 Other Python Resources 42

3.8 Further Reading 42

3.9 Glossary 43

3a Interlude: My Personal Toolkit 45

4 Data Munging: String Manipulation, Regular Expressions, and Data Cleaning 47

4.1 The Worst Dataset in the World 48

4.2 How to Identify Pathologies 48

4.3 Problems with Data Content 49

4.4 Formatting Issues 51

4.5 Example Formatting Script 54

4.6 Regular Expressions 55

4.7 Life in the Trenches 60

4.8 Glossary 60

5 Visualizations and Simple Metrics 61

5.1 A Note on Python?s Visualization Tools 62

5.2 Example Code 62

5.3 Pie Charts 63

5.4 Bar Charts 65

5.5 Histograms 66

5.6 Means, Standard Deviations, Medians, and Quantiles 69

5.7 Boxplots 70

5.8 Scatterplots 72

5.9 Scatterplots with Logarithmic Axes 74

5.10 Scatter Matrices 76

5.11 Heatmaps 77

5.12 Correlations 78

5.13 Anscombe?s Quartet and the Limits of Numbers 80

5.14 Time Series 80

5.15 Further Reading 85

5.16 Glossary 85

6 Machine Learning Overview 87

6.1 Historical Context 88

6.2 Supervised versus Unsupervised 89

6.3 Training Data, Testing Data, and the Great Boogeyman of Overfitting 89

6.4 Further Reading 91

6.5 Glossary 91

7 Interlude: Feature Extraction Ideas 93

7.1 Standard Features 93

7.2 Features That Involve Grouping 94

7.3 Preview of More Sophisticated Features 95

7.4 Defining the Feature You Want to Predict 95

8 Machine Learning Classification 97

8.1 What Is a Classifier, and What Can You Do with It? 97

8.2 A Few Practical Concerns 98

8.3 Binary versus Multiclass 99

8.4 Example Script 99

8.5 Specific Classifiers 101

8.6 Evaluating Classifiers 114

8.7 Selecting Classification Cutoffs 117

8.8 Further Reading 119

8.9 Glossary 119

9 Technical Communication and Documentation 121

9.1 Several Guiding Principles 122

9.2 Slide Decks 124

9.3 Written Reports 128

9.4 Speaking: What Has Worked for Me 130

9.5 Code Documentation 131

9.6 Further Reading 132

9.7 Glossary 132

Part II Stuff You Still Need to Know 133

10 Unsupervised Learning: Clustering and Dimensionality Reduction 135

10.1 The Curse of Dimensionality 136

10.2 Example: Eigenfaces for Dimensionality Reduction 138

10.3 Principal Component Analysis and Factor Analysis 140

10.4 Skree Plots and Understanding Dimensionality 142

10.5 Factor Analysis 143

10.6 Limitations of PCA 143

10.7 Clustering 144

10.8 Further Reading 151

10.9 Glossary 151

11 Regression 153

11.1 Example: Predicting Diabetes Progression 153

11.2 Least Squares 156

11.3 Fitting Nonlinear Curves 157

11.4 Goodness of Fit: R2 and Correlation 159

11.5 Correlation of Residuals 160

11.6 Linear Regression 161

11.7 LASSO Regression and Feature Selection 162

11.8 Further Reading 164

11.9 Glossary 164

12 Data Encodings and File Formats 165

12.1 Typical File Format Categories 165

12.2 CSV Files 167

12.3 JSON Files 168

12.4 XML Files 170

12.5 HTML Files 172

12.6 Tar Files 174

12.7 GZip Files 175

12.8 Zip Files 175

12.9 Image Files: Rasterized, Vectorized, and/or Compressed 176

12.10 It?s All Bytes at the End of the Day 177

12.11 Integers 178

12.12 Floats 179

12.13 Text Data 180

12.14 Further Reading 183

12.15 Glossary 183

13 Big Data 185

13.1 What Is Big Data? 185

13.2 Hadoop: The File System and the Processor 187

13.3 Using HDFS 188

13.4 Example PySpark Script 189

13.5 Spark Overview 190

13.6 Spark Operations 192

13.7 Two Ways to Run PySpark 193

13.8 Configuring Spark 194

13.9 Under the Hood 195

13.10 Spark Tips and Gotchas 196

13.11 The MapReduce Paradigm 197

13.12 Performance Considerations 199

13.13 Further Reading 200

13.14 Glossary 200

14 Databases 203

14.1 Relational Databases and MySQL 204

14.2 Key-Value Stores 210

14.3 Wide Column Stores 211

14.4 Document Stores 211

14.5 Further Reading 214

14.6 Glossary 214

15 Software Engineering Best Practices 217

15.1 Coding Style 217

15.2 Version Control and Git for Data Scientists 220

15.3 Testing Code 222

15.4 Test-Driven Development 225

15.5 AGILE Methodology 225

15.6 Further Reading 226

15.7 Glossary 226

16 Natural Language Processing 229

16.1 Do I Even Need NLP? 229

16.2 The Great Divide: Language versus Statistics 230

16.3 Example: Sentiment Analysis on Stock Market Articles 230

16.4 Software and Datasets 232

16.5 Tokenization 233

16.6 Central Concept: Bag‐of‐Words 233

16.7 Word Weighting: TF‐IDF 235

16.8 n‐Grams 235

16.9 Stop Words 236

16.10 Lemmatization and Stemming 236

16.11 Synonyms 237

16.12 Part of Speech Tagging 237

16.13 Common Problems 238

16.14 Advanced NLP: Syntax Trees, Knowledge, and Understanding 240

16.15 Further Reading 241

16.16 Glossary 242

17 Time Series Analysis 243

17.1 Example: Predicting Wikipedia Page Views 244

17.2 A Typical Workflow 247

17.3 Time Series versus Time-Stamped Events 248

17.4 Resampling an Interpolation 249

17.5 Smoothing Signals 251

17.6 Logarithms and Other Transformations 252

17.7 Trends and Periodicity 252

17.8 Windowing 253

17.9 Brainstorming Simple Features 254

17.10 Better Features: Time Series as Vectors 255

17.11 Fourier Analysis: Sometimes a Magic Bullet 256

17.12 Time Series in Context: The Whole Suite of Features 259

17.13 Further Reading 259

17.14 Glossary 260

18 Probability 261

18.1 Flipping Coins: Bernoulli Random Variables 261

18.2 Throwing Darts: Uniform Random Variables 263

18.3 The Uniform Distribution and Pseudorandom Numbers 263

18.4 Nondiscrete, Noncontinuous Random Variables 265

18.5 Notation, Expectations, and Standard Deviation 267

18.6 Dependence, Marginal and Conditional Probability 268

18.7 Understanding the Tails 269

18.8 Binomial Distribution 271

18.9 Poisson Distribution 272

18.10 Normal Distribution 272

18.11 Multivariate Gaussian 273

18.12 Exponential Distribution 274

18.13 Log-Normal Distribution 276

18.14 Entropy 277

18.15 Further Reading 279

18.16 Glossary 279

19 Statistics 281

19.1 Statistics in Perspective 281

19.2 Bayesian versus Frequentist: Practical Tradeoffs and Differing Philosophies 282

19.3 Hypothesis Testing: Key Idea and Example 283

19.4 Multiple Hypothesis Testing 285

19.5 Parameter Estimation 286

19.6 Hypothesis Testing: t-Test 287

19.7 Confidence Intervals 290

19.8 Bayesian Statistics 291

19.9 Naive Bayesian Statistics 293

19.10 Bayesian Networks 293

19.11 Choosing Priors: Maximum Entropy or Domain Knowledge 294

19.12 Further Reading 295

19.13 Glossary 295

20 Programming Language Concepts 297

20.1 Programming Paradigms 297

20.2 Compilation and Interpretation 305

20.3 Type Systems 307

20.4 Further Reading 309

20.5 Glossary 309

21 Performance and Computer Memory 311

21.1 Example Script 311

21.2 Algorithm Performance and Big‐O Notation 314

21.3 Some Classic Problems: Sorting a List and Binary Search 315

21.4 Amortized Performance and Average Performance 318

21.5 Two Principles: Reducing Overhead and Managing Memory 320

21.6 Performance Tip: Use Numerical Libraries When Applicable 322

21.7 Performance Tip: Delete Large Structures You Don?t Need 323

21.8 Performance Tip: Use Built‐In Functions When Possible 324

21.9 Performance Tip: Avoid Superfluous Function Calls 324

21.10 Performance Tip: Avoid Creating Large New Objects 325

21.11 Further Reading 325

21.12 Glossary 325

Part III Specialized or Advanced Topics 327

22 Computer Memory and Data Structures 329

22.1 Virtual Memory, the Stack, and the Heap 329

22.2 Example C Program 330

22.3 Data Types and Arrays in Memory 330

22.4 Structs 332

22.5 Pointers, the Stack, and the Heap 333

22.6 Key Data Structures 337

22.7 Further Reading 343

22.8 Glossary 343

23 Maximum Likelihood Estimation and Optimization 345

23.1 Maximum Likelihood Estimation 345

23.2 A Simple Example: Fitting a Line 346

23.3 Another Example: Logistic Regression 348

23.4 Optimization 348

23.5 Gradient Descent and Convex Optimization 350

23.6 Convex Optimization 353

23.7 Stochastic Gradient Descent 355

23.8 Further Reading 355

23.9 Glossary 356

24 Advanced Classifiers 357

24.1 A Note on Libraries 358

24.2 Basic Deep Learning 358

24.3 Convolutional Neural Networks 361

24.4 Different Types of Layers. What the Heck Is a Tensor? 362

24.5 Example: The MNIST Handwriting Dataset 363

24.6 Recurrent Neural Networks 366

24.7 Bayesian Networks 367

24.8 Training and Prediction 369

24.9 Markov Chain Monte Carlo 369

24.10 PyMC Example 370

24.11 Further Reading 373

24.12 Glossary 373

25 Stochastic Modeling 375

25.1 Markov Chains 375

25.2 Two Kinds of Markov Chain, Two Kinds of Questions 377

25.3 Markov Chain Monte Carlo 379

25.4 Hidden Markov Models and the Viterbi Algorithm 380

25.5 The Viterbi Algorithm 382

25.6 Random Walks 384

25.7 Brownian Motion 384

25.8 ARIMA Models 385

25.9 Continuous‐Time Markov Processes 386

25.10 Poisson Processes 387

25.11 Further Reading 388

25.12 Glossary 388

25a Parting Words: Your Future as a Data Scientist 391

Index 393

A comprehensive overview of data science covering the analytics, programming, and business skills necessary to master the discipline

Finding a good data scientist has been likened to hunting for a unicorn: the required combination of technical skills is simply very hard to find in one person. In addition, good data science is not just rote application of trainable skill sets; it requires the ability to think flexibly about all these areas and understand the connections between them. This book provides a crash course in data science, combining all the necessary skills into a unified discipline.

Unlike many analytics books, computer science and software engineering are given extensive coverage since they play such a central role in the daily work of a data scientist. The author also describes classic machine learning algorithms, from their mathematical foundations to real-world applications. Visualization tools are reviewed, and their central importance in data science is highlighted. Classical statistics is addressed to help readers think critically about the interpretation of data and its common pitfalls. The clear communication of technical results, which is perhaps the most undertrained of data science skills, is given its own chapter, and all topics are explained in the context of solving real-world data problems. The book also features:

? Extensive sample code and tutorials using Python? along with its technical libraries

? Core technologies of ?Big Data,? including their strengths and limitations and how they can be used to solve real-world problems

? Coverage of the practical realities of the tools, keeping theory to a minimum; however, when theory is presented, it is done in an intuitive way to encourage critical thinking and creativity

? A wide variety of case studies from industry

? Practical advice on the realities of being a data scientist today, including the overall workflow, where time is spent, the types of datasets worked on, and the skill sets needed

The Data Science Handbook is an ideal resource for data analysis methodology and big data software tools. The book is appropriate for people who want to practice data science, but lack the required skill sets. This includes software professionals who need to better understand analytics and statisticians who need to understand software. Modern data science is a unified discipline, and it is presented as such. This book is also an appropriate reference for researchers and entry-level graduate students who need to learn real-world analytics and expand their skill set.

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