Statistical Learning Big Data

This textbook provides an accessible overview of statistical learning methods and techniques, and includes case studies using the statistical software Stata. After introductory material on statistical learning concepts and practical aspects, each further chapter is devoted to a statistical learning algorithm or a group of related techniques. In particular, the book presents logistic regression, regularized linear models such as the Lasso, nearest neighbors, the Naive Bayes classifier, classification trees, random forests, boosting, support vector machines, feature engineering, neural networks, and stacking. It also explains how to construct n-gram variables from text data. Examples, conceptual exercises and exercises using software are featured throughout, together with case studies in Stata, mostly from the social sciences; true to the book’s goal to facilitate the use of modern methods of data science in the field. Although mainly intended for upper undergraduate and graduate students in the social sciences, given its applied nature, the book will equally appeal to readers from other disciplines, including the health sciences, statistics, engineering and computer science.

This textbook provides an accessible overview of statistical learning methods and techniques, and includes case studies using the statistical software Stata. After introductory material on statistical learning concepts and practical aspects, each further chapter is devoted to a statistical learning algorithm or a group of related techniques. In particular, the book presents logistic regression, regularized linear models such as the Lasso, nearest neighbors, the Naive Bayes classifier, classification trees, random forests, boosting, support vector machines, feature engineering, neural networks, and stacking. It also explains how to construct n-gram variables from text data. Examples, conceptual exercises and exercises using software are featured throughout, together with case studies in Stata, mostly from the social sciences; true to the book’s goal to facilitate the use of modern methods of data science in the field. Although mainly intended for upper undergraduate and graduate students in the social sciences, given its applied nature, the book will equally appeal to readers from other disciplines, including the health sciences, statistics, engineering and computer science.

This textbook for graduate students in statistics, data science, and public health deals with the practical challenges that come with big, complex, and dynamic data. It presents a scientific roadmap to translate real-world data science applications into formal statistical estimation problems by using the general template of targeted maximum likelihood estimators. These targeted machine learning algorithms estimate quantities of interest while still providing valid inference.

Traditional statistical methods are limited in their ability to meet the modern challenge of mining large amounts of data. Data miners, analysts, and statisticians are searching for innovative new data mining techniques with greater predictive power, an attribute critical for reliable models and analyses.

This contributed volume explores the emerging intersection between big data analytics and genomics. Recent sequencing technologies have enabled high-throughput sequencing data generation for genomics resulting in several international projects which have led to massive genomic data accumulation at an unprecedented pace.

This textbook for graduate students in statistics, data science, and public health deals with the practical challenges that come with big, complex, and dynamic data. It presents a scientific roadmap to translate real-world data science applications into formal statistical estimation problems by using the general template of targeted maximum likelihood estimators. These targeted machine learning algorithms estimate quantities of interest while still providing valid inference.