This accessible and classroom-tested textbook/reference presents an introduction to the fundamentals of the emerging and interdisciplinary field of data science. The coverage spans key concepts adopted from statistics and machine learning, useful techniques for graph analysis and parallel programming, and the practical application of data science for such tasks as building recommender systems or performing sentiment analysis. Topics and features: provides numerous practical case studies using real-world data throughout the book; supports understanding through hands-on experience of solving data science problems using Python; describes techniques and tools for statistical analysis, machine learning, graph analysis, and parallel programming; reviews a range of applications of data science, including recommender systems and sentiment analysis of text data; provides supplementary code resources and data at an associated website.

An introductory textbook offering a low barrier entry to data science; the hands-on approach will appeal to students from a range of disciplines.

Introduction to Data Science: Data Analysis and Prediction Algorithms with R introduces concepts and skills that can help you tackle real-world data analysis challenges. It covers concepts from probability, statistical inference, linear regression, and machine learning. It also helps you develop skills such as R programming, data wrangling, data visualization, predictive algorithm building, file organization with UNIX/Linux shell, version control with Git and GitHub, and reproducible document preparation. This book is a textbook for a first course in data science. No previous knowledge of R is necessary, although some experience with programming may be helpful. The book is divided into six parts: R, data visualization, statistics with R, data wrangling, machine learning, and productivity tools. Each part has several chapters meant to be presented as one lecture. The author uses motivating case studies that realistically mimic a data scientist’s experience. He starts by asking specific questions and answers these through data analysis so concepts are learned as a means to answering the questions. Examples of the case studies included are: US murder rates by state, self-reported student heights, trends in world health and economics, the impact of vaccines on infectious disease rates, the financial crisis of 2007-2008, election forecasting, building a baseball team, image processing of hand-written digits, and movie recommendation systems. The statistical concepts used to answer the case study questions are only briefly introduced, so complementing with a probability and statistics textbook is highly recommended for in-depth understanding of these concepts. If you read and understand the chapters and complete the exercises, you will be prepared to learn the more advanced concepts and skills needed to become an expert.

For many researchers, Python is a first-class tool mainly because of its libraries for storing, manipulating, and gaining insight from data. Several resources exist for individual pieces of this data science stack, but only with the Python Data Science Handbook do you get them all—IPython, NumPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, Scikit-Learn, and other related tools. Working scientists and data crunchers familiar with reading and writing Python code will find this comprehensive desk reference ideal for tackling day-to-day issues: manipulating, transforming, and cleaning data; visualizing different types of data; and using data to build statistical or machine learning models. Quite simply, this is the must-have reference for scientific computing in Python. With this handbook, you’ll learn how to use: IPython and Jupyter: provide computational environments for data scientists using Python NumPy: includes the ndarray for efficient storage and manipulation of dense data arrays in Python Pandas: features the DataFrame for efficient storage and manipulation of labeled/columnar data in Python Matplotlib: includes capabilities for a flexible range of data visualizations in Python Scikit-Learn: for efficient and clean Python implementations of the most important and established machine learning algorithms

Summary Introducing Data Science teaches you how to accomplish the fundamental tasks that occupy data scientists. Using the Python language and common Python libraries, you'll experience firsthand the challenges of dealing with data at scale and gain a solid foundation in data science. Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About the Technology Many companies need developers with data science skills to work on projects ranging from social media marketing to machine learning. Discovering what you need to learn to begin a career as a data scientist can seem bewildering. This book is designed to help you get started. About the Book Introducing Data ScienceIntroducing Data Science explains vital data science concepts and teaches you how to accomplish the fundamental tasks that occupy data scientists. You’ll explore data visualization, graph databases, the use of NoSQL, and the data science process. You’ll use the Python language and common Python libraries as you experience firsthand the challenges of dealing with data at scale. Discover how Python allows you to gain insights from data sets so big that they need to be stored on multiple machines, or from data moving so quickly that no single machine can handle it. This book gives you hands-on experience with the most popular Python data science libraries, Scikit-learn and StatsModels. After reading this book, you’ll have the solid foundation you need to start a career in data science. What’s Inside Handling large data Introduction to machine learning Using Python to work with data Writing data science algorithms About the Reader This book assumes you're comfortable reading code in Python or a similar language, such as C, Ruby, or JavaScript. No prior experience with data science is required. About the Authors Davy Cielen, Arno D. B. Meysman, and Mohamed Ali are the founders and managing partners of Optimately and Maiton, where they focus on developing data science projects and solutions in various sectors. Table of Contents Data science in a big data world The data science process Machine learning Handling large data on a single computer First steps in big data Join the NoSQL movement The rise of graph databases Text mining and text analytics Data visualization to the end user

Learn data science by doing data science! Data Science Using Python and R will get you plugged into the world’s two most widespread open-source platforms for data science: Python and R. Data science is hot. Bloomberg called data scientist “the hottest job in America.” Python and R are the top two open-source data science tools in the world. In Data Science Using Python and R, you will learn step-by-step how to produce hands-on solutions to real-world business problems, using state-of-the-art techniques. Data Science Using Python and R is written for the general reader with no previous analytics or programming experience. An entire chapter is dedicated to learning the basics of Python and R. Then, each chapter presents step-by-step instructions and walkthroughs for solving data science problems using Python and R. Those with analytics experience will appreciate having a one-stop shop for learning how to do data science using Python and R. Topics covered include data preparation, exploratory data analysis, preparing to model the data, decision trees, model evaluation, misclassification costs, naïve Bayes classification, neural networks, clustering, regression modeling, dimension reduction, and association rules mining. Further, exciting new topics such as random forests and general linear models are also included. The book emphasizes data-driven error costs to enhance profitability, which avoids the common pitfalls that may cost a company millions of dollars. Data Science Using Python and R provides exercises at the end of every chapter, totaling over 500 exercises in the book. Readers will therefore have plenty of opportunity to test their newfound data science skills and expertise. In the Hands-on Analysis exercises, readers are challenged to solve interesting business problems using real-world data sets.

This comprehensive guide provides a step-by-step approach to data collection, cleaning, formatting, and storage, using Python and R.