Good Reads

Doing Data Science: Straight Talk from the Frontline

Release Date: October 2013

Pages: 408

Now that people are aware that data can make the difference in an election or a business model, data science as an occupation is gaining ground. But how can you get started working in a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary field that’s so clouded in hype? This insightful book, based on Columbia University’s Introduction to Data Science class, tells you what you need to know.

In many of these chapter-long lectures, data scientists from companies such as Google, Microsoft, and eBay share new algorithms, methods, and models by presenting case studies and the code they use. If you’re familiar with linear algebra, probability, and statistics, and have programming experience, this book is an ideal introduction to data science.

Topics include:

Statistical inference, exploratory data analysis, and the data science process
Algorithms
Spam filters, Naive Bayes, and data wrangling
Logistic regression
Financial modeling
Recommendation engines and causality
Data visualization
Social networks and data journalism
Data engineering, MapReduce, Pregel, and Hadoop

Doing Data Science is collaboration between course instructor Rachel Schutt, Senior VP of Data Science at News Corp, and data science consultant Cathy O’Neil, a senior data scientist at Johnson Research Labs, who attended and blogged about the course.

Doing Data Science: Straight Talk from the Frontline

Available online

by Rob J Hyndman and George Athanasopoulos

Publisher: OTexts

Release Date: 13 October 2013

Forecasting is required in many situations. Deciding whether to build another power generation plant in the next five years requires forecasts of future demand. Scheduling staff in a call centre next week requires forecasts of call volumes. Stocking an inventory requires forecasts of stock requirements. Telecommunication routing requires traffic forecasts a few minutes ahead. Whatever the circumstances or time horizons involved, forecasting is an important aid in effective and efficient planning. This textbook provides a comprehensive introduction to forecasting methods and presents enough information about each method for readers to use them sensibly. Examples use R with many data sets taken from the authors' own consulting experience.

The Mechanics of Machine Learning

by Terence Parr and Jeremy Howard (2018-2019 )

Available online

This book is a primer on machine learning for programmers trying to get up to speed quickly. You'll learn how machine learning works and how to apply it in practice. We focus on just a few powerful models (algorithms) that are extremely effective on real problems, rather than presenting a broad survey of machine learning algorithms as many books do. Co-author Jeremy used these few models to become the #1 competitor for two consecutive years at Kaggle.com. This narrow approach leaves lots of room to cover the models, training, and testing in detail, with intuitive descriptions and full code implementations.

Interpretable Machine Learning

This book is available online.

Machine learning has great potential for improving products, processes and research. But computers usually do not explain their predictions which is a barrier to the adoption of machine learning. This book is about making machine learning models and their decisions interpretable.

After exploring the concepts of interpretability, you will learn about simple, interpretable models such as decision trees, decision rules and linear regression. Later chapters focus on general model-agnostic methods for interpreting black box models like feature importance and accumulated local effects and explaining individual predictions with Shapley values and LIME.

All interpretation methods are explained in depth and discussed critically. How do they work under the hood? What are their strengths and weaknesses? How can their outputs be interpreted? This book will enable you to select and correctly apply the interpretation method that is most suitable for your machine learning project.