About the Course

Introduction to Data Science is being offered a second time in the Fall 2013. One major change this year is that I will be co-teaching with Dr. Kayur Patel, a computer scientist at Google. Here’s the Syllabus:

Introduction to Data Science Syllabus, Fall 2013
Statistics W4242, Columbia University

Staff
Professors: Dr. Kayur Patel (kp2566@columbia.edu) and Dr. Rachel Schutt (rrs2117@columbia.edu)
Lab Instructor: Jared Lander (jpl2135@columbia.edu)
Teaching Assistant: Haolei Weng (hw2375@columbia.edu)
Project Coordinator: Anna Hurley (anna.c.hurley@gmail.com)

Location and Time
Lectures: Mondays and Wednesdays, 6:10-7:25pm @ 428 Pupin Laboratories
Labs: Tuesdays, 6:10-7:25pm @ 312 Math OR 7:40-8:55pm @ 417 Math
TA Office Hours: Tuesdays and Fridays, 2:00-4:00pm @ Lounge 10th floor, SSW (School of Social Work) and by appointment

Course Description
This course serves as an introduction to the interdisciplinary and emerging field of data science. Students will learn to combine tools and techniques from statistics, computer science, data visualization and the social sciences to solve problems using data. Central threads include: (1) the data science process from data collection to product, (2) tools for working with both big and small datasets, (3) statistical modeling and machine learning, and (4) real world topics and case studies. The course consists of: (1) core lectures by the instructors, (2) guest lectures from data scientists who are experts in their fields, and (3) a course-long project. Topics and tools will include data wrangling and munging, machine learning algorithms, statistical models, data visualization, data journalism, R, ethics, MapReduce, and data pipelines.

Goals of the course
1) Learn about what it’s like to be a data scientist
2) Be able to do some of what a data scientist does

Schedule and course structure
The course is organized into two sections. The first section is devoted to the data science process. Lectures during this period will correspond to the various stages of the process to build student skill sets and understanding. The second section is special topics and case studies in data science and will include guest lectures that demonstrate the data science process in context, as well as deeper dives into different classes of data including text, images and graphs.

9/4/2024

Canceled [Rosh Hashanah]

9/9/2024

Introduction, Syllabus, Data Science Process

9/11/2024

Data Science Process, Intro to Algorithms

9/16/2013

Scoping Projects, Asking good questions [Drew Conway, Datakind]

9/18/2013

Data: Unstructured vs. Structured Data, Databases

9/23/2013

Sampling and exploratory data analysis

9/25/2013

Statistical modeling and inference

9/30/2013

HCI and Data Science

10/2/2025

Feature Selection, Kaggle Competition [Will Cukierski, Kaggle]

10/7/2024

Machine Learning Overview: Classification, Regression, Clustering

10/9/2024

Machine Learning: Specific algorithms

10/14/2013

Visualization: Charts, Graphs, Precognitive Features

10/16/2013

Visualization: Interactive visualizations, Infographics

10/21/2013

Data & Journalism

10/23/2013

Data & Journalism [Steve Lohr & Andy Lehren, The New York Times]

10/28/2013

Working at Scale: memory, parallelization, mapreduce [Aaron Kimball]

10/30/2013

Midterm Project Presentations (Ignite Talks)

11/4/2024

Academic Holiday

11/6/2013- 12/2/2025

Special topics and case studies may include natural language processing, machine translation, crowd-sourcing, mechanical turk, social network data. Guest lecturers most likely from Facebook, Google, Foursquare, Microsoft Research

12/4/2013, 12/9/2024

Project Presentations

5 comments

  1. Do you have this class ONLINE! I am very much interested.

    1. Rachel Schutt · · Reply

      No. Sorry!

  2. I am looking forward to seeing this course offered on coursera!

  3. Ditto for Coursera. I would like to take this.

  4. Marco Shaw · · Reply

    August 2013 - http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920028529.do

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 435 other followers

Build a website with WordPress.com
%d bloggers like this: