First course of the EdX / UC San Diego MicroMasters in Data Science
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This course teaches how to conduct data science by learning how to analyze data.
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That includes knowing how to import data, explore it, analyze it, learn from it, visualize it, and ultimately generate easily shareable reports. It also introduces to two powerful areas of data analysis: machine learning and natural language processing.
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To conduct data analysis, you'll learn a collection of powerful, open-source, tools including:
- python
- jupyter notebooks
- pandas
- numpy
- matplotlib
- scikit learn
- nltk
- And many other tools
The beginning of the course is heavily focused on learning the basic tools of data science and the latter half of the course is a combination of working on large projects and introductions to advanced data analysis techniques.
Welcome and overview of the course. Introduction to the data science process and the value of learning data science.
In this optional week, we provide a brief background in python or unix to get you up and running. If you are already familiar with python and/or unix, feel free to skip this content.
Jupyter notebooks are one of the most commonly used tools in data science as they allow you to combine your research notes with the code for the analysis. After getting started in Jupyter, we'll learn how to use numpy for data analysis. numpy offers many useful functions for processing data as well as data structures which are time and space efficient.
Pandas, built on top of numpy, adds data frames which offer critical data analysis functionality and features.
When working with large datasets, you often need to visualize your data to gain a better understanding of it. Also, when you reach conclusions about the data, you'll often wish to use visualizations to present your results.
With the tools of Jupyter notebooks, numpy, pandas, and Visualization, you're ready to do sophisticated analysis on your own. You'll pick a dataset we've worked with already and perform an analysis for this first project.
To take your data analysis skills one step further, we'll introduce you to the basics of machine learning and how to use sci-kit learn - a powerful library for machine learning.
You'll find yourself often working with text data or data from databases. This week will give you the skills to access that data. For text data, we'll also give you a preview of how to analyze text data using ideas from the field of Natural Language Processing and how to apply those ideas using the Natural Language Processing Toolkit (NLTK) library.