Practical Data Science with R, Second Edition

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 ideas (in particular, summary statistics such as the mean, mode, median, variance, and standard deviation). In this appendix, we’ll demonstrate a few more important statistical concepts that relate to model fitting, characterizing uncertainty, and experimental design.

Statistics is math, so this appendix is a bit mathematical. It’s also intended to teach you the proper statistical nomenclature, so you can share your work ...