Tag: data mining
Probability Theory (For Scientists and Engineers)
Probability Theory (For Scientists and Engineers)
Michael Betancourt
April 2018
Formal probability theory is a rich and complex field of mathematics with a reputation for being confusing if not outright impenetrable. Much of that intimidation, however, is due not to the abstract mathematics but rather how they are employed in practice. In particular, many introductions to probability theory sloppily confound the abstract mathematics with their practical implementations, convoluting what we can calculate in the theory with how we perform those calculations. To make matters even worse, probability theory is used to model a variety of subtlely different systems, which then burdens the already confused mathematics with the distinct and often conflicting philosphical connonations of those applications.
Berkeley offers its data science course online for free
The course — Data 8X (Foundations of Data Science) — covers everything from testing hypotheses, applying statistical inferences, visualizing distributions and drawing conclusions, all while coding in Python and using real-world data sets. One lesson might take economic data from different countries over the years to track global economic growth. The next might use a data set of cell samples to create a classification algorithm that can diagnose breast cancer. (Learn more from a video on the Berkeley data science website.)
Data set sources
- http://www.stat.ncsu.edu/research/sas/sicl/data/
A large collection of small data sets for the book ‘A Handbook of small data sets (Hand)’ - http://www.statsci.org/datasets.html
Data sets and links on StatSci