Great Data Science Books

By: Gordon Fleetwood – ODSC data science team contributor

Writing any book is a momentous task. At ODSC, we have been fortunate to have speakers at our Big Data Science Conference who have completed this task, and added to the rich library of Data Science literature. Here are a few of these books.

Applied Predictive Modeling, Max Kuhn

Max Kuhn is a superstar in the R world known for this creation of the caret library, an all-purpose package which is R's equivalent of scikit-learn. Applied Predictive Modeling is a tome dedicated to every aspect of the model building process, from data pre-processing and feature engineering to model selection. All of the theory is accompanied by R code snippets showing the practical applications of concept through caret.

Think Bayes, Allen Downey

Bayesian Statistics is at the heart of Data Science, and Think Bayes is a superb way to from Bayesian apprentice to Bayesian master. The thoroughness and clarity that Mr. Downey has brought to his numerous talks over the years is on display in written form.

Python for Data Analysis, Wes McKinney

Once there were only R dataframes, and Python was left in the dark with only the csv module for company. Then came Wes McKinney, and so dataframes came to Python through the pandas library. Python for Data Analysis is written around pandas and the various operations it supports for use on the dataframes it produces. Mr. McKinney goes through data cleaning, visualization, aggregation all the way to time series. It's pretty comprehensive, to say the least.

R for Everyone: Advanced Analytics and Graphics, Jared Lander

Jared Lander is another name that R users will be instantly familiar with. R For Everyone lives up to its name by starting from the very basics of the language, and working its way up to advanced usage like running statistical tests, building models, and making R packages. The existence of a companion video series makes is the icing on the cake that is a comprehensive look at the one of Data Science's most popular languages.

ODSC conferences give attendees the opportunity to speak with and have books signed by authors. Don’t miss out on this opportunity at ODSC East!

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