Practical Data Science with Python

8

Probability, Distributions, and Sampling

Life is full of uncertainty – we make decisions based on incomplete information all the time. Much of data science has to do with making decisions based on incomplete information. For example, should we show an advertisement for an exercise bike or an iPad to a website visitor? Loans provide another example; deciding on whether to give someone a loan based on their credit history and current income is a decision we might make with a machine learning algorithm. We will examine concepts of probability in this chapter, which lay the foundations for machine learning and statistical methods. Closely related to probability are sampling techniques and probability distributions. In this chapter, we'll cover: ...