Data Acquisition and Exploratory Data Analysis

Fall 2024

M/W 12:05 - 1:25, 2115 PEARSON

Instructor: Wangqian (Will) Ju, wju at iastate dot edu

Office Hours: MW 1:30-2:30 Snedecor 1205

TA: Olivia Frazier, ofrazier at iastate dot edu

Office Hours: TR 10:00-11:00 Snedecor 2404

Course description:

Not all data lives in nice, clean spreadsheets, not all data fits in a computer's main memory. But all data contains interesting stories for us to find. We will discuss how to read and work with data in different formats: flat files, databases, web technologies. It is important to keep ethical aspects in mind when accessing and working with data. Elements of literate programming help us with making our workflow transparent and analyses reproducible. Data summaries, both numerically and graphically, help us gain insight into the data. We will discuss good practices of data visualizations. Communication of results happens in form of reports and interactive web applications.

Learn how to...

• pull data together to solve a contemporary problem,
• read and combine data from different formats, such as flat files, SQL databases, and web formats such as json,
• compute with data (mad wrangling skills ahead!),
• clean the data, check the quality, impute missing values,
• write efficient and reproducible code so others are able to replicate the analysis,
• experiment with event driven programming to build an interactive graphic, and a GUI,
• tell a story with data and the confidence that comes with it.

More info...

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The course organization on GitHub: https://github.com/DS202-at-ISU
Repo that creates this website: https://github.com/DS202-at-ISU/DS202-at-ISU.github.io