The Foundations of Data Science

https://www.inferentialthinking.com/

Data are descriptions of the world around us, collected through observation and stored on computers. Computers enable us to infer properties of the world from these descriptions. Data science is the discipline of drawing conclusions from data using computation. There are three core aspects of effective data analysis: exploration, prediction, and inference. This text develops a consistent approach to all three, introducing statistical ideas and fundamental ideas in computer science concurrently. We focus on a minimal set of core techniques that they apply to a vast range of real-world applications. A foundation in data science requires not only understanding statistical and computational techniques, but also recognizing how they apply to real scenarios.