Stats

Hypothesis Testing

Hypothesis Testing #

Hypothesis testing is a statistical decision-making method used to decide whether sample evidence is strong enough to reject an initial assumption about a population.

It connects probability, sampling distributions, confidence intervals, significance levels, and decision rules.

Key takeaway:
Hypothesis testing is not about proving something with certainty.

It is about asking:

If the null hypothesis were true, how surprising would this sample result be?

Prediction & Forecasting

Prediction & Forecasting #

Prediction and forecasting use statistical models to estimate unknown or future values.

In this module, the focus is on correlation, regression, and time series forecasting.

Key takeaway:
Prediction estimates a value using a model.

Forecasting is prediction where the order of time matters.

  • Correlation
  • Regression
  • Time series analysis
  • Components of time series data
  • Moving average and weighted moving average
  • AR model
  • ARMA model
  • ARIMA model
  • SARIMA and SARIMAX
  • VAR and VARMAX
  • Simple exponential smoothing

Prediction vs Forecasting ☆ #

ConceptMeaningExample
PredictionEstimate an unknown outputPredict house price from area and rooms
ForecastingPredict future values using time orderForecast sales for next month
All forecasting is prediction, but not all prediction is forecasting.

Overall Workflow #

flowchart LR
    A[Data] --> B[Explore Pattern]
    B --> C[Choose Model]
    C --> D[Train or Fit]
    D --> E[Validate]
    E --> F[Predict or Forecast]
    F --> G[Interpret Error]

    style A fill:#E1F5FE
    style B fill:#C8E6C9
    style C fill:#FFF9C4
    style D fill:#EDE7F6
    style E fill:#C8E6C9
    style F fill:#E1F5FE
    style G fill:#FFF9C4

Correlation ☆ #

Correlation measures the direction and strength of linear relationship between two variables.

Gaussian Mixture Model & Expectation Maximization

Gaussian Mixture Model & Expectation Maximization #

A Gaussian Mixture Model represents data as a weighted combination of multiple Gaussian distributions.

It is commonly used for soft clustering and density estimation.

Key takeaway:
K-means gives hard cluster membership.

GMM gives probabilities of belonging to each cluster.

  • Gaussian Mixture Model
  • soft clustering
  • mixing coefficients
  • latent variables
  • likelihood and log-likelihood
  • Expectation-Maximization algorithm
  • E-step and M-step
  • responsibilities
  • convergence

Motivation ☆ #

Many real datasets are not described well by one Gaussian distribution.