This chapter covers
- The basics of some statistical software applications
- Introductions to a few useful programming languages
- Choosing the appropriate software to use or build
- How to think about getting statistics into your software
Figure 8.1 shows where we are in the data science process: building statistical software. In the last chapter, I introduced statistics as one of the two core concepts of data science. Knowledge of software development and application is the other. If statistics is the framework for analyzing and drawing conclusions from data, then software is the tool that puts this framework into action. In few cases would a data scientist be able to go without software during a project, but I suppose it’s possible when the data set is very small.
Figure 8.1. An important aspect of the build phase of the data science process: statistical software and engineering
