SUMMARY

Statistics is the branch of mathematics that deals with chance and uncertainty. Randomness is inherent in chance and uncertainty, and random number generators are the principal source of randomness on computers. Although historically most programmers have not needed to have much knowledge in these areas, the machine learning approaches that are currently showing the most promise in developing artificial intelligence solutions to dealing with real-world data are strongly rooted in statistics. A new field of data science is emerging at the interface between computer science and statistics. If you want to embrace this field and become a data scientist, you need to develop skills in statistics and machine learning equal to your expertise in programming. Even if you expect to remain in more traditional areas of coding and programming, machine learning techniques seem likely to have increasingly wide application, so it’s worthwhile to develop some understanding of data science...