A large portion of the field of statistics is concerned with methods that assume a Gaussian distribution: the familiar bell curve. If your data has a Gaussian distribution, the parametric methods are powerful and well understood. This gives some incentive to use them if possible. Even if your data does not have a Gaussian distribution. […]
Parametric statistical methods often mean those methods that assume the data samples have a Gaussian distribution. in applied machine learning, we need to compare data samples, specifically the mean of the samples. Perhaps to see if one technique performs better than another on one or more datasets. To quantify this question and interpret the results, […]
In applied machine learning, we often need to determine whether two data samples have the same or different distributions. We can answer this question using statistical significance tests that can quantify the likelihood that the samples have the same distribution. If the data does not have the familiar Gaussian distribution, we must resort to nonparametric […]
Data must be interpreted in order to add meaning. We can interpret data by assuming a specific structure our outcome and use statistical methods to confirm or reject the assumption. The assumption is called a hypothesis and the statistical tests used for this purpose are called statistical hypothesis tests. Whenever we want to make claims […]
An important decision point when working with a sample of data is whether to use parametric or nonparametric statistical methods. Parametric statistical methods assume that the data has a known and specific distribution, often a Gaussian distribution. If a data sample is not Gaussian, then the assumptions of parametric statistical tests are violated and nonparametric […]
A large portion of the field of statistics and statistical methods is dedicated to data where the distribution is known. Samples of data where we already know or can easily identify the distribution of are called parametric data. Often, parametric is used to refer to data that was drawn from a Gaussian distribution in common […]
Statistical methods are used at each step in an applied machine learning project. This means it is important to have a strong grasp of the fundamentals of the key findings from statistics and a working knowledge of relevant statistical methods. Unfortunately, statistics is not covered in many computer science and software engineering degree programs. Even […]
The central limit theorem is an often quoted, but misunderstood pillar from statistics and machine learning. It is often confused with the law of large numbers. Although the theorem may seem esoteric to beginners, it has important implications about how and why we can make inferences about the skill of machine learning models, such as […]
We have an intuition that more observations is better. This is the same intuition behind the idea that if we collect more data, our sample of data will be more representative of the problem domain. There is a theorem in statistics and probability that supports this intuition that is a pillar of both of these […]
A sample of data is a snapshot from a broader population of all possible observations that could be taken of a domain or generated by a process. Interestingly, many observations fit a common pattern or distribution called the normal distribution, or more formally, the Gaussian distribution. A lot is known about the Gaussian distribution, and […]
