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Practical Data Analysis

You're reading from   Practical Data Analysis Pandas, MongoDB, Apache Spark, and more

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Product type Paperback
Published in Sep 2016
Publisher
ISBN-13 9781785289712
Length 338 pages
Edition 2nd Edition
Languages
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Authors (2):
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Hector Cuesta Hector Cuesta
Author Profile Icon Hector Cuesta
Hector Cuesta
Dr. Sampath Kumar Dr. Sampath Kumar
Author Profile Icon Dr. Sampath Kumar
Dr. Sampath Kumar
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Toc

Table of Contents (16) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Getting Started 2. Preprocessing Data FREE CHAPTER 3. Getting to Grips with Visualization 4. Text Classification 5. Similarity-Based Image Retrieval 6. Simulation of Stock Prices 7. Predicting Gold Prices 8. Working with Support Vector Machines 9. Modeling Infectious Diseases with Cellular Automata 10. Working with Social Graphs 11. Working with Twitter Data 12. Data Processing and Aggregation with MongoDB 13. Working with MapReduce 14. Online Data Analysis with Jupyter and Wakari 15. Understanding Data Processing using Apache Spark

Monte Carlo methods


Random Walk is a member of a family of random sampling algorithms. Proposed by Stanislaw Ulam in 1940, Monte Carlo methods are mainly used when the event has uncertainty and deterministic boundaries (the previous estimate was for a range of limit values). These methods are especially good for optimization and numerical integration in finance, biology, business, physics, and statistics.

Monte Carlo methods depend on the probability distribution of the random number generator to see different behaviors in the simulations. The most common distribution is the Gauss or Normal; this distribution is also referred to as Bell Curve (see the following diagram), but there are more distributions such as the Geometric or Poisson. In statistics, the Central Limit Theorem (CTL) proposes that the Gaussian distribution will appear in almost any case. Where the sample of n elements from a uniform random source (if the number of samples gets larger, the approximation improves), the sum of...

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