Course Syllabus

In this course, you will be introduced to the importance of gathering, cleaning, normalizing, visualizing and analyzing data to drive informed decision-making, no matter the field of study. You will learn to use a combination of tools and techniques, including spreadsheets, SQL, and Python to work on real-world datasets using a combination of procedural and basic machine learning algorithms. You will also learn to ask good, exploratory questions and develop metrics to come up with well thought-out analyses. Presenting and discussing analyses of datasets you have chosen will be an important part of the course.Our textbooks for the class are:

Our textbooks for the class are:

How to Think Like a Data Scientist (Runestone Academy Course Name: httlads-bennsp21)  by Miller, Boggs, and Pearce

Python Data Science Handbook by Jake VanderPlas

We will be using the Bennington Physics Slack Workspace to communicate this term. Please make sure you join both of the Spring 2021 How to Think Like a Data Scientist channel: #spring2021-httlads.

We will meet as a class every Monday and Thursday from 10am to 11:50am.

The schedule for the course is below. Note that links to readings, data sets, assignments, and projects will become active as the term goes on.

Week of	Topic	Reading	Datasets Used
Feb 15	Introduction & Overview	Ch. 1	Happiness Survey
Feb 22	Working in Spreadsheets	Ch 2
March 1	Spreadsheet Data Analysis	Ch. 2
March 8	Python Review + Pandas Introduction	Ch. 4	Movie Data
March 15	Filtering & Indexing Data Frames	Ch. 5
March 22	Data Cleaning & Exploration Altair and Plotting	Ch. 5	CIA World Factbook
March 29	Altair and Plotting	Ch. 6
April 5	Midterm Project Presentations (No Class Friday)
April 12	Text Analysis	Ch. 8	UN Speeches
April 19	Text Analysis (cont.)	Ch. 8
April 26	Text Analysis (cont.)	Ch. 8
May 3	SQL Introduction (No Class Tuesday)	Ch. 9	Bike Rentals
May 10	SQL (cont.)	Ch. 9
May 17	Final Projects	TBA	Your Own Data
May 24	Final Projects	TBA