Statistics

At the end of the day, the success of your machine learning application is going to come down to the quality of your data, your understanding of the data, and your evaluation/validation of the results. All three of these things require us to have an understanding of statistics.

The field of statistics helps us to gain an understanding of our data, and to quantify what our data and results look like. It also provides us with mechanisms to measure how well our application is performing and prevent certain machine learning pitfalls (such as overfitting).

As with linear algebra, we aren't able to give a complete introduction to statistics here, but there are many resources online and in print to learn introductory statistics. Here we will focus on a fundamental understanding of the basics, along with the practicalities of implementation in Go. We will introduce the idea of distributions, along with an introduction to quantifying and visualizing these distributions.