Practical Data Science with R

Appendix B. Important statistical concepts

Statistics is such a broad topic that we’ve only been able to pull pieces of it into our data science narrative. But it’s an important field that has a lot to say about what happens when you attempt to infer from data. We’ve assumed in this book that you already know some statistical tools (in particular, summary statistics like the mean, mode, median, and variance). In this appendix, we’ll demonstrate a few more important statistical concepts.

B.1. Distributions

In this section, we’ll outline a few important distributions: the normal distribution, the lognormal distribution, and the binomial distribution. As you work further, you’ll also want to learn many other key distributions (such as Poisson, ...