Category Course Topics
Mapping Data to Senses
Hi Students, Data visualization leverages the same cognitive processing system that evolved to spot savanna cats skulking in tall grass, recognize emotions in other human faces, and distinguish between food that is and is not safe to eat. We’ve evolved to perceive the world, and as primates, a lot of that perception is visual. The […]
Building Products with Machine Learning
Hi Students, This week Rachel will cover machine learning. I hope you guys love the material as much as I do. Well, maybe not as much as I do… I spent the better part of a decade writing a book on how to build machine learning tools. Since I’ve spent some time thinking about making machine […]
R Package Cheesy Goodness
Each week Ethan Rouen, a student in the class, will post on a topic of his interest based on class lectures. Ethan is a Ph.D. student in accounting at Columbia Business School and a columnist for Fortune.com. Props to the professors for the timing of the Kaggle competition announcement on Wednesday night. I’m sure I wasn’t […]
Data products in the wild
Hi Students, Monday’s lecture will focus on Human Factors in Data Science. The class will be an onslaught of needs finding, design, prototyping, and evaluation. It will be intense; brace yourselves. As data scientists, you will ultimately produce a data product, be it a graph or a report or a presentation. This product will affect the […]
Deep Thoughts with the Central Limit Theorem
Each week Ethan Rouen, a student in the class, will post on a topic of his interest based on class lectures. Ethan is a Ph.D. student in accounting at Columbia Business School and a columnist for Fortune.com. A wise man once said, “Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything. Fourteen percent of people […]
Understanding Models: two articles, eight months apart
Hi Students, I wanted to kick off the course blog by talking about two different Wired articles written 8 months apart. They present divergent perspectives about understanding and trusting models. The first article (The End of Theory by Chris Anderson) takes the position that large data triumphs over everything. It talks about how petabyte-scale data and […]
Announcing the Columbia Data Science Society
There is a new student group on campus called the Columbia Data Science Society. They’ve asked me to pass along the following information: Introducing Columbia Data Science Society! Columbia Data Science Society, CDSS, is an interdisciplinary society that promotes data science across Columbia University and the New York City community. Our goal is to understand […]
