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Data Science Essentials Textbook

A free, self-paced textbook in 8 chapters. Read a chapter, then drill it with the 234 companion flashcards using spaced repetition.

8 chapters · 234 cards · Updated

Chapters

  1. 1Foundations of Data Science

    Data science is an interdisciplinary field that combines statistics, programming, and domain expertise to extract meaningful insights from data. A data scientist typically draws on...

  2. 2Data Preparation and Feature Engineering

    Real datasets arrive messy, and most of a practitioner's time goes into preparing them. Data cleaning is the process of detecting and correcting errors such as missing values, dupl...

  3. 3Model Training, Validation, and Evaluation

    To estimate how a model will perform on unseen data, practitioners split the data into training and testing sets. This simple train-test split protects against overfitting, the fai...

  4. 4Classical Machine Learning Algorithms

    Linear regression models a continuous target as a linear combination of features, predicting \( \hat{y} = w^\top x + b \). It is interpretable, fast, and a baseline against which m...

  5. 5Unsupervised Learning and Deep Learning

    When labels are absent, unsupervised methods extract structure directly from the data. Clustering algorithms group similar points: k-means partitions data into \(k\) clusters by mi...

  6. 6Statistics, Inference, and Interpretability

    Statistics is the language with which claims are tested and uncertainty is communicated. Exploratory analysis generates hypotheses from the data; confirmatory analysis then tests t...

  7. 7Tools, Infrastructure, and MLOps

    Python is the dominant language in data science, supported by a layered ecosystem. NumPy provides N-dimensional arrays and fast vectorized operations; pandas offers DataFrames for...

  8. 8Domains, Governance, and Communication

    Several specialized domains deserve their own methods. Natural Language Processing (NLP) analyzes and generates text. Its pipeline begins with tokenization, splitting text into wor...

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