A Practical Introduction to Data Science 2023
Data science is an amalgam of tools, techniques, and processes from statistics, computer science, signal processing, machine learning, …, chosen to form a powerful toolbox and a set of best practices for modern data analysis. Success stories of data science range from molecular biology where it is used to understand single cell RNA sequencing datasets, over physics where it is used to detect new elementary particles, to governance and policymaking where it is used to visualize, understand, and predict global migration flows. A Practical Introduction to Data Science is a first data science course for a varied audience, which emphasizes concrete examples in Python. It assumes some familiarity with programming, ideally in Python. The course covers exploratory data analysis, causal reasoning, data visualization principles, fundamentals of statistics and probability, and machine learning, with many computational examples.