how safe is home birthingthat is good question pause moment and let yourself contemplate it am sure you can see how the answer to this question can affect personal decisions and policy choices the answer could be given as probabilitya level classificationor an alternative cost another natural reaction is "it depends there are many factors that could affect the safety of home birthing took you through this thought exercise to show you that you naturally think like data scientist you understood the importance of stipulating clearly the focus of the analysis and what could explain different outcomes the reason you are embarking on journey through this book is that you are not sure how to express these instinctive notions mathematically and instruct computer to "findthe relationship between the "featuresand the "target when started my career -odd years agothis was the domain of statisticians who crafted mathematical language to describe relationships and noise the purpose of predictive modeling was in its essence to be tool for separating signal or pattern out of seemingly chaotic information and reporting how well the partition was done todaymachine learning algorithms harnessing computing brute force add new paradigm this has created new professionthe data scientist the data scientist is practitioner who can think in terms of statistical methodologyinstruct computer to carry out the required processingand interpret the results and reports xv