Principles of Data Science - Third Edition

7

What Are the Chances? An Introduction to Statistics

This chapter will focus on the statistical knowledge required by any aspiring data scientist.

We will explore ways of sampling and obtaining data without being affected by bias and then use measures of statistics to quantify and visualize our data. Using the z-score and the empirical rule, we will see how we can standardize data for the purposes of both graphing and interpretability.

In this chapter, we will look at the following topics:

• How to obtain and sample data
• The measures of center, variance, and relative standing
• Normalization of data using the z-score
• The empirical rule

What are statistics?

This might seem like an odd question to ask, but I am frequently surprised by the number ...