Introduction

Welcome to the fascinating world of data science! We are sure you must be pretty excited to start your journey and learn interesting and exciting techniques and algorithms. This is exactly what this book is intended for.

But before ping into it, let's define what data science is: it is a combination of multiple disciplines, including business, statistics, and programming, that intends to extract meaningful insights from data by running controlled experiments similar to scientific research.

The objective of any data science project is to derive valuable knowledge for the business from data in order to make better decisions. It is the responsibility of data scientists to define the goals to be achieved for a project. This requires business knowledge and expertise. In this book, you will be exposed to some examples of data science tasks from real-world datasets.

Statistics is a mathematical field used for analyzing and finding patterns from data. A lot of the newest and most advanced techniques still rely on core statistical approaches. This book will present to you the basic techniques required to understand the concepts we will be covering.

With an exponential increase in data generation, more computational power is required for processing it efficiently. This is the reason why programming is a required skill for data scientists. You may wonder why we chose Python for this Workshop. That's because Python is one of the most popular programming languages for data science. It is extremely easy to learn how to code in Python thanks to its simple and easily readable syntax. It also has an incredible number of packages available to anyone for free, such as pandas, scikit-learn, TensorFlow, and PyTorch. Its community is expanding at an incredible rate, adding more and more new functionalities and improving its performance and reliability. It's no wonder companies such as Facebook, Airbnb, and Google are using it as one of their main stacks. No prior knowledge of Python is required for this book. If you do have some experience with Python or other programming languages, then this will be an advantage, but all concepts will be fully explained, so don't worry if you are new to programming.