The module consists of ten topics that focus on key areas of the fundamentals of statistics and statistical data
mining that are required for data science.
Topic
Topic 1: Exploratory data analysis (EDA)
Topic 2: Data preprocessing, correlation and
probability overview
Topic 3: Sampling and hypothesis tests
Topic 4: Significance tests
Topic 5: Linear regression
Key concepts Learning outcomes
• Understand the basics of statistics 
• Overview of statistics and scales of measurement 
• Explain different data types 
• Different types of variables in data 
• Describe data via basic statistics, such as mean, median and so on 
• Measures of location and variation (e.g. mean, median, mode, percentiles,
• Explain the concept of variability in data 
interquartile range) 
• Generate basic statistical and visual summaries of data using Python 
• Basic data visualisation
• Understand how to interpret box, histogram and bar plots
• Typical problems with data, such as missing values and the need for type • Be able to deal with missing values in data 
transformation  • Transform data into different representations 
• Correlation (and causation) and covariance  • Describe the relationship between numeric variables 
• Scatter plots and heatmaps  • Understand the purpose and importance of probabilities 
• Introduction to probability theory  • Work out probability values in various situations (e.g. conditional events,
• Conditional probability independent events and so on)
• Data sampling and why it is important and useful  • Understand sampling, random selection and bias 
• Random sampling, bias and the central limit theorem  • Describe sampling distribution of a statistic and the central limit theorem 
• Confidence intervals  • Explain confidence intervals 
• Resampling and bootstrapping  • Differentiate between data distributions (i.e. normal distribution, binomial
• Various data distributions  distribution and so on) 
• Hypothesis tests • Understand hypothesis tests, the null and alternative hypotheses
• Understand the concept of hypothesis testing 
• Critical appraisal and its purposes 
• Understand and interpret the p-value 
• Hypothesis tests: the null hypothesis and the alternative hypothesis 
• Explain various types of significance tests and select the correct test based on the
• Statistical significance and p-values 
data 
• t-Tests, ANOVA test, chi-square test, and power and sample size analysis
• Perform hypothesis tests in Python
• Understand regression as a modelling method 
• Correlation and simple linear regression 
• Apply the method of least squares and calculate useful metrics for diagnostics and
• The method of least squares 
evaluation 
• The null and alternative hypotheses in linear regression 
• Be aware of two uses of regression as a hypothesis test and an aid to accurate
• Error and evaluation methods and metrics 
prediction 
• Model interpretation 
• Generate simple or multiple linear regression models in Python and interpret them
• Multiple linear regression 
correctly 
• The problem of collinearity
• Understand how model selection works and why it is useful

Topic 6: Logistic regression
Topic 7: Extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost)
Topic 8: Working with imbalanced data
Topic 9: Unsupervised learning and feature selection
Topic 10: Machine learning in the cloud – AWS as an
example
• A brief overview of regression and classification  • Explain odds and odd ratio and explain the effect of the sigmoid function 
• The sigmoid function, odds and odds ratio  • Understand concept of maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) 
• Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE)  • Extract and interpret class probabilities from logistical regression 
• Interpreting results of logistic regression variable (i.e feature) • Obtain feature importance from logistical regression model 
•  Importance based on logistic regression • Logistic regression in Python
• Overview of gradient boosting, decision trees and bagging 
• Understand why XGBoost is powerful 
• How XGBoost works 
• Become familiar with hyperparameter tuning 
• XGBoost for classification and regression 
• Obtain feature importance from XGBoost model 
• Overview of hyperparameters and how to tune them for XGBoost 
• XGBoost in Python
• Variable (i.e feature) importance based on XGBoost
• Understand the problem of class imbalance 
• Why class imbalance is a challenging problem and the drawbacks of • Choose a suitable metric (other than accuracy) 
accuracy  • Explain how data sampling can help in dealing with class imbalanced data 
• Other useful classification evaluation metrics  • Understand confusion and cost matrix 
• Data sampling methods to balance imbalanced data  • Understand cost-sensitive classification 
• Cost-sensitive classification (with example models) • Python code with a real-world example problem (tuning the probability threshold
using a cost matrix)
• Compare different types of clustering techniques 
• Revision of k-Means clustering 
• Implement a simple k-means clustering method 
• Hierarchical clustering 
• Explain how SOM works 
• Self organising map (SOM) 
• Understand what outliers are and automatically identify them 
• Outlier detection 
• Understand the importance and application of feature selection 
• Feature selection
• Python code examples for some of these techniques
• Use SageMaker to launch a Jupyter Notebook instance 
• Cloud computing and its benefits 
• Use AWS’s Transcribe, Translate and Polly services 
• AWS’s SageMaker service 
• Become familiar with AWS’s Rekognition service 
• Several artificial intelligence and machine learning services on AWS
• Become familiar with AWS’s Comprehend service