Coursera Johns Hopkins Specialization in Data Science

course dependency information.

There are nine courses in the sequence plus a capstone project course. For the courses, we consider
two forms of dependency

Hard dependency: Students will be required to know material from the prerequisite course.
Taking the dependent course simultaneously will be challenging and only possible for highly
motivated students willing to work ahead of the course schedule for the prerequisite. Taking hard
dependent courses out of order is not possible unless the student already knows the material
covered in the prerequisite course.

Soft dependency: Knowledge of material from the prerequisite course is recommended and
useful. Concurrently taking the prerequisite course and the dependent course is possible. It is not
recommended to take them out of order, but would be possible for highly motivated students
willing to self-teach components of the prerequisite course as needed.

1. The Data Scientist’s Toolbox

This is the primary introductory course for the specialization. It should be taken first and has no
prerequisite courses. Students should be computer literate, have programmed in at least one
computer language and be motivated self-learners.

2. R Programming
This is the most crucial course for the remainder of the specialization. It is softly dependent on The
Data Scientist’s Toolbox. It should be taken before the remaining courses in the series.

3. Getting and Cleaning Data

This course has hard dependencies on R Programming and The Data Scientist’s Toolbox.

4. Exploratory Data Analysis

This course has hard dependencies on R Programming and The Data Scientist’s Toolbox.

5. Reproducible Research
This course has hard dependencies on R Programming and The Data Scientist’s Toolbox.

6. Statistical Inference
This course has hard dependencies on R Programming and The Data Scientist’s Toolbox. In addition,
students will need basic (non calculus) mathematics skills.

7. Regression Models
This course has hard dependencies on R Programming, The Data Scientist’s Toolbox and Statistical
Inference.

8. Practical Machine Learning

This course has hard dependencies on R Programming, The Data Scientist’s Toolbox and Regression
Models. It has a soft dependency on Exploratory Data Analysis.
 9. Developing Data Products
This course has hard dependencies on R Programming, The Data Scientist’s Toolbox and
Reproducible Research. It has a soft dependency of Exploratory Data Analysis.

1. Data Science Tool Box:

We believe that the key word in Data Science is "science". Our course track is focused on providing
you with three things: (1) an introduction to the key ideas behind working with data in a scientific
way that will produce new and reproducible insight, (2) an introduction to the tools that will allow
you to execute on a data analytic strategy, from raw data in a database to a completed report with
interactive graphics, and (3) on giving you plenty of hands on practice so you can learn the
techniques for yourself.

Course Content:

 Track motivation

 Getting help

 Introduction to basic tools

 R

 RStudio

 Git

 GitHub

 Types of data questions

 Steps in a data analysis

 Putting the science in data science

Specialization Textbooks

 Elements of Data Analytic Style by Jeff Leek

 R Programming for Data Science by Roger Peng

 Exploratory Data Analysis with R by Roger Peng

 Report Writing for Data Science in R by Roger Peng

 Statistical Inference for Data Science by Brian Caffo

 Regression Modeling for Data Science in R by Brian Caffo

 Developing Data Products in R by Brian Caffo

In addition, to the above books, two additional books that are highly relevant to the Specialization
are

 The Art of Data Science by Roger Peng

 How to Be A Modern Scientist by Jeff Leek

They key word in Data Science is not Data, It is a “Science”.

Statistics is the Science of learning from Data.

In week two of course, we're going to be covering a bunch of software that you're going

to install that will constitute the data scientist's toolbox, as we described it for this course's track.

So the first question you might ask yourself is, what software do you need?

Well to know what, software you need, you have to know what exactly a data scientist is going to
do. So, in this course sequence we're going to talk about all the different components of being a data
scientist.

So we're going to start with defining a question of interest, and then identifying the ideal data set try
to ident, to answer that question.

Determining if that data is even accessible, a lot of times the ideal dataset isn't even available.

Then ways that you can go out and actually obtain the data whether it's from a database, or from a
website, cleaning the data up so that it can be processed and analysed.

Performing some sort of exploratory analysis, including making plots and clustering so you

can identify patterns that you didn't know about beforehand in the data set.

Performing statistical prediction or modelling to try to, build a sort of an intuition about what's going
to happen in the next sample you might take.

Interpreting your results, challenging them. Then synthesizing them and writing them up in

reproducible ways that can be shared with other people. Finally, we're going to talk about
distributing results through things like interacting graphics, also through right ups and presentations,
and finally through interactive apps built on top of R.

So the main workhorse of data science in terms of this data science track is the R programming
language.

There are other alternative languages that are also really great for data science, but we're

going to be focusing on R, since it's one of the most widely used languages. And it's widely supported
by a large group of developers. Who can contribute new packages all the time that can improve and
extend the functionality of R.

RStudio is an Integrated Development Environment, an IDE for R.

It's actually one of the best IDE's I think for many other languages as well in terms of data science.

Some important R functions:

 1) Access helpfile: ?rnorm
2) Search Helpfiles: [Link](“rnorm”)
3) Get arguments: args(“rnorm”)
4) function (n, mean = 0, sd = 1) NULL

Stackoverflow with the tag R is a really good place to get information about R.
And, so, you have to use this tag because if you just use the letter R, it obviously is,
sometimes, a little bit hard to search for.
You can also try the R mailing list for software questions or CrossValidated for more general
questions.
Usually what I've found is that if I'm going to work in Google, searching Google, I use usually
type something like the data type and then data analysis or I type the data type and then
the R package. I found that data type R package often works a little bit better than data
type, data analysis when Googling things.
Another thing to keep in mind is that data analysis or data science is often called something
different depending on what kind of data you are looking at, so for example medical data it
might be called biostatistics.
For data from the web it might be data science.
For data in computer vision it might be machine learning
or natural language processing for data from text and so on. So, knowing what the right
word to Google is, is often half the battle. And so, you can often find that out by posting to
forums and people will let you know what the right word to be googling is.

In Module 1 overview of all courses have been done briefly.

Now Its ended.
What's the deal with these videos?
And why do the videos say almost exactly the same thing as the printed lecture material.
You have probably already noticed that the lectures and videos for
this class are structured a little differently than in many MOOCS you have taken.
We created this video to explain to you why we made this change and
why we think it highlights the awesome power of R and Data Science.
We create a lot of massive online open courses at the Johns Hopkins Data Science Lab.
We have created more than 30 courses on multiple platforms over the last five years.
Our goal with these classes is to provide
the best and most up-to-date information to the broadest audience possible,
but there are significant challenges to maintaining this much material online.
R-packages go out of date,
new workflows are invented and typos, all the typos.
We use to make these courses like many other universities.
We'd create course material in the form of
lecture slides then we record videos of ourselves delivering those lectures.
In some ways this was great,
you actually got to hear our voices delivering your lectures including all the yawns,
umms, buts and so's.
But the downside is that,
it is difficult and time-consuming to update
the content when we have to book a recording studio,
set up special equipment,
record ourselves delivering a lecture,
edit those lectures, and then upload them to a system.
The result is that, a lot of our lectures have been out of date include
errors or don't include the latest best versions of workflows and pipelines.
This has been a problem for a while,
but as the number of courses we offer grows,
it has become more and more of a challenge for us to keep them up-to-date.
Whole websites have been set up to monitor all the problems with our courses.
So we started to think about how to solve this challenging problem.
We realized that while recording and editing videos,
is extremely time consuming,
there is another type of content we can edit,
update, and maintain much more frequently.
Regular old plain text documents.
We aren't the only ones who have thought this,
massive online open course innovators like Lorena Barba had
been saying that videos aren't even necessary for these types of courses.
So when we sat down to develop our new process for creating and maintaining our courses,
we wanted to see if we could figure out how to make
a classmate entirely out of plain text documents.
We broke down a massive online open course into its basic elements.
Tutorials. These we can easily write in plain text formats like Markdown or R Markdown.
Slides. These are easy enough to maintain and
share if we make them with something like Google Slides.
Assessments. Here, we can use a markup language to create quizzes and other
assessments.
Finally, we need videos.
This was the sticking point.
How are we going to make videos from plain text documents?
By a happy coincidence,
the data science and artificial intelligence communities were solving
a huge part of this problem for us improving text voice synthesis.
So we can now write a script for a video and use Amazon Polly to synthesize our voices.
To take advantage of this new technology,
we created two new R packages, Ari and Detector.
Ari will take a script and a set of Google Slides and narrate
this script over the slides using Amazon Polly.
It will also generate the closed caption file needed to include
captions and ensure that the videos are accessible to those with hearing impairment.
Detector automate several of the steps from creating the videos with Ari,
to uploading them to YouTube so that we can quickly make edits to the scripts or slides.
We make the videos, we upload them and we do
some maintenance overhead for keeping our content fresh.
Whenever we change the text file or edit the slides,
we can recreate the video in a couple of minutes.
Everything is done in our one of the coolest features of going to
this new process is showing you how powerful we are programming languages.
This is the main language you will learn in this program and we hope you will be able
to build cool things like this system by the time you are done with our courses.
Why did we choose this approach instead of creating each piece of a lesson separately?
Well, first this process makes it a lot easier for us to maintain and update the courses.
If you report an issue or find a mistake with a lesson,
all we need to do is to change the script or
the Google Slides and recreate the courses again.
Therefore, we will have a more efficient way
of maintaining the course content and updating it.
Second, by using this process we have made our instruction more accessible.
Since videos have transcripts and transcripts have voice-over,
the content is accessible by those of us who have disabilities.
For everyone else, you can have a choice of reading versus listening,
versus watching the content as you wish.
Finally, a cool feature of using text-to-speech synthesis is that,
our videos will keep getting better as the voice synthesis software improves.
It means that we can change the voice to different voices.
Ultimately, it will allow us to translate our courses into
different languages quickly and automatically using Machine Learning.
We think this highlights,
the incredible power of data science and artificial intelligence to improve the world.
If you find the robot voice annoying, we get it.
We know that the technology isn't perfect yet,
that's why we've made the written lecture material
reflect as closely as possible the video lectures.
So, you can pick how you want to consume our classes.
We hope that this change will allow us to better
serve you with the best content at the fastest speed.
Thanks for participating in this new phase of course development with us.

Like
Dislike
Share
Why Automated Videos
What’s the deal with these videos? And why do the videos say almost exactly the same
thing as the printed lecture material? You have probably already noticed that the lectures
and videos for this class are structured a little differently than in many MOOCs you have
taken. We created this video to explain to you why we made this change and why we think
it highlights the awesome power of R and data science.
We create a lot of massive online open courses at the Johns Hopkins Data Science Lab. We
have created more than 30 courses on multiple platforms over the last 5 years. Our goal
with these classes is to provide the best and most up to date information to the broadest
audience possible.
But there are significant challenges to maintaining this much material online. R packages go
out of date, new workflows are invented, and typos - oh, the typos!
We used to make these courses like many other universities. We’d create course material in
the form of lecture slides, then we’d record videos of ourselves delivering those lectures. In
some ways this was great - you actually got to hear our voices delivering your lectures,
including all the “yawns”, “ums”, “buts”, and “so’s”. But the downside is that it is difficult
and time consuming to update the content when we have to book a recording studio, set up
special equipment, record ourselves delivering a lecture, edit those lectures, and then
upload them to a system.
The result is that a lot of our lectures have been out of date, include errors, or don’t include
the latest, best versions of workflows and pipelines. This has been a problem for a while, but
as the number of courses we offer grows, it has become more and more of a challenge for
us to keep them up to date.
So we started to think about how to solve this challenging problem. We realized that while
recording and editing videos is extremely time consuming there is another type of content
we can edit, update, and maintain much more frequently - regular old plain text documents.
We aren’t the only ones who have thought this - massive online open course innovators like
Lorena Barba have been saying that videos aren’t even necessary for these types of courses.
So when we sat down to develop our new process for creating and maintaining our courses
we wanted to see if we could figure out how to make a class made entirely out of plain text
documents. We broke down a massive online open course into its basic elements:
 Tutorials - these we can easily write in plain text formats like markdown or R
markdown.
 Slides - these are easy enough to maintain and share if we make them with
something like Google Slides.
 Assessments - here we can use a markup language to create quizzes and other
assessments.
 Videos - this was the sticking point, how were we going to make videos from plain
text documents?
By a happy coincidence, the data science and artificial intelligence communities were solving
a huge part of this problem for us, improving text to voice synthesis! So we could now write
a script for a video and use Amazon Polly to synthesize our voices!
To take advantage of this new technology we created two new R packages: ari and didactr.
Ari will take a script and a set of Google Slides and narrate the script over the slides using
Amazon Polly. It will also generate the closed caption file needed to include captions and
ensure that the videos are accessible to those with hearing impairment. Didactr automates
several of the steps from creating the videos with ari to uploading them to YouTube, so that
we can quickly make edits to the scripts or slides, remake the videos, re-upload them, and
reduce our maintainence overhead for keeping our content fresh.
Whenever we change the text file or edit the slides, we can recreate the video in a couple of
minutes. Everything is done in R. One of the coolest features of going to this new process is
showing you how powerful the R programming language is. This is the main language you
will learn in this specialization and we hope you will be able to build cool things like this
system by the time you are done with our courses.
Why did we choose this approach instead of creating each piece of a lesson separately?
Well, first, this process makes it a lot easier for us to maintain and update the courses. If you
report an issue or find a mistake with a lesson, all we need to do is to change these two files
and recreate the courses again. Therefore, we will have a more efficient way of maintaining
the course content and updating it. Second, by using this process we have made our
instruction more accessible. Since videos have transcripts and transcripts have voice over,
the content is accessible by those of us who have disabilities. For everyone else, you can
have a choice of reading versus listening versus watching the content as you wish.
Finally, a cool feature of using text to speech synthesis is that our videos will keep getting
better as the voice synthesis software improves. It means that we can change the voice to
different voices. Ultimately, it will allow us to translate our courses into different languages
quickly and automatically using machine learning. We think this highlights the incredible
power of data science and artificial intelligence to improve the world.
If you find the robot voice annoying, we get it. We know that the technology isn’t perfect
yet. That’s why we’ve made the written lecture material reflect as closely as possible the
video lectures. So you can pick how you want to consume our classes. We hope that this
change will allow us to better serve you with the best content at the fastest speed. Thanks
for participating in this new phase of course development with us!
Hello and welcome to the Data Scientist's Toolbox,
the first course in the Data Science Specialization series.
Here, we will be going over the basics of data science and
introducing you to the tools that will be used throughout the series.
So, the first question you probably need answered going into this course is,
what is data science?
That is a great question.
To different people this means different things,
but at its core, data science is using data to answer questions.
This is a pretty broad definition and that's because it's a pretty broad field.
Data science can involve statistics, computer science,
mathematics, data cleaning and formatting, and data visualization.
An Economist Special Report sums up this melange of skills well.
They state that a data scientist is broadly defined as
someone who combines the skills of software programmer,
statistician, and storyteller/artists to
extract the nuggets of gold hidden under mountains of data.
By the end of these courses,
hopefully you will feel equipped to do just that.
One of the reasons for the rise of data science in recent years
is the vast amount of data currently available and being generated.
Not only are massive amounts of data being
collected about many aspects of the world and our lives,
but we simultaneously have the rise of inexpensive computing.
This has created the perfect storm in which we enrich data and the tools to analyze it,
rising computer memory capabilities,
better processors, more software and now,
more data scientists with the skills to put this
to use and answer questions using this data.
There is a little anecdote that describes
the truly exponential growth of data generation we are experiencing.
In the third century BC,
the Library of Alexandria was believed to house the sum of human knowledge.
Today, there is enough information in the world to give every person alive
320 times as much of it as historians think was stored in Alexandria's entire collection,
and that is still growing.
We'll talk a little bit more about big data in a later lecture.
But it deserves an introduction here since it
has been so integral to the rise of data science.
There are a few qualities that characterize big data.
The first is volume.
As the name implies,
big data involves large datasets.
These large datasets are becoming more and more routine.
For example, say you had a question about online video.
Well, YouTube has approximately 300 hours of video uploaded every minute.
You would definitely have a lot of data available to you to analyze.
But you can see how this might be a difficult problem to wrangle all of that data.
This brings us to the second quality of Big Data, velocity.
Data is being generated and collected faster than ever before.
In our YouTube example,
new data is coming at you every minute.
In a completely different example,
say you have a question about shipping times of rats.
Well, most transport trucks have real-time GPS data available.
You could in real time analyze the trucks
movements if you have the tools and skills to do so.
The third quality of big data is variety.
In the examples I've mentioned so far,
you have different types of data available to you.
In the YouTube example,
you could be analyzing video or audio,
which is a very unstructured dataset,
or you could have a database of video lengths,
views or comments, which is a much more structured data set to analyze.
So, we've talked about what data science is and what sorts of data it deals with,
but something else we need to discuss is what exactly a data scientist is.
The most basic of definitions would be that
a data scientist is somebody who uses data to answer questions.
But more importantly to you,
what skills does a data scientist embody?
To answer this, we have
this illustrative Venn diagram in which
data science is the intersection of three sectors,
substantive expertise, hacking skills,
and math and statistics. To explain a little on what we mean by this,
we know that we use data science to answer questions.
So first, we need to have enough expertise in the area that we want to ask about in order
to formulate our questions, and to know what sorts of
data are appropriate to answer that question.
Once we have our question and appropriate data,
we know from the sorts of data that data science works with.
Oftentimes it needs to undergo significant cleaning and formatting.
This often takes computer programming/hacking skills.
Finally, once we have our data,
we need to analyze it.
This often takes math and stats knowledge.
In this specialization, we'll spend a bit of
time focusing on each of these three sectors.
But we'll primarily focus on math and statistics knowledge and hacking skills.
For hacking skills, we'll focus on teaching two different components,
computer programming or at least computer
programming with R which will allow you to access data,
play around with it, analyze it, and plot it.
Additionally, we'll focus on having you learn how to
go out and get answers to your programming questions.
One reason data scientists are in such demand is that
most of the answers are not already outlined in textbooks.
A data scientist needs to be somebody who knows how to find answers to novel problems.
Speaking of that demand,
there is a huge need for individuals with
data science skills. Not only are machine-learning engineers,
data scientists, and big data engineers among the top emerging jobs in 2017
according to LinkedIn, the demand far exceeds the supply.
They state, "Data scientists roles have grown over 650 percent since 2012.
But currently, 35,000 people in the US have data science skills while hundreds of
companies are hiring for those roles - even those you
may not expect in sectors like retail and finance.
Supply of candidates for these roles cannot keep up with demand."
This is a great time to be getting into data science.
Not only do we have more and more data,
and more and more tools for collecting,
storing, and analyzing it,
but the demand for data scientists is becoming
increasingly recognized as important in many diverse sectors,
not just business and academia.
Additionally, according to Glassdoor, in which they ranked the top 50 best jobs in America,
data scientist is THE top job in the US in
2017, based on job satisfaction, salary, and demand.
The diversity of sectors in which data science is being used
is exemplified by looking at examples of data scientists.
One place we might not immediately recognize the demand for data science is in sports.
Daryl Morey is the general manager of a US basketball team, the Houston Rockets.
Despite not having a strong background in basketball,
Morey was awarded the job as GM on the basis of
his bachelor's degree in computer science and his MBA from MIT.
He was chosen for his ability to collect and analyze
data and use that to make informed hiring decisions.
Another data scientists that you may have heard of his Hilary Mason.
She is a co-founder of FastForward Labs,
a machine learning company recently acquired by Cloudera,
a data science company,
and is the Data Scientist in Residence at Accel.
Broadly, she uses data to answer questions about mining the web and
understanding the way that humans interact with each other through social media.
Finally, Nate Silver is one of
the most famous data scientists or statisticians in the world today.
He is founder and editor in chief
at FiveThirtyEight,
a website that uses statistical analysis -
hard numbers - to tell compelling stories about elections,
politics, sports, science, economics, and lifestyle.
He uses large amounts of
totally free public data to make predictions about a variety of topics.
Most notably, he makes predictions about who will win elections in the United States,
and has a remarkable track record for accuracy doing so.
One great example of data science in action is from
2009 in which researchers at Google analyzed
50 million commonly searched terms over
a five-year period and compared them against CDC data on flu outbreaks.
Their goal was to see if certain searches coincided with outbreaks of the flu.
One of the benefits of data science and using
big data is that it can identify correlations.
In this case, they identified 45 words that had
a strong correlation with the CDC flu outbreak data.
With this data, they have been able to predict
flu outbreaks based solely off of common Google searches.
Without this mass amounts of data,
these 45 words could not have been predicted beforehand.
Now that you have had this introduction into data science,
all that really remains to cover here is a summary of
what it is that we will be teaching you throughout this course.
To start, we'll go over the basics of R. R is
the main programming language that we will be working with in this course track.
So, a solid understanding of what it is,
how it works, and getting it installed on your computer is a must.
We'll then transition into RStudio, which is a very nice graphical interface to R,
that should make your life easier.
We'll then talk about version control,
why it is important,
and how to integrate it into your work.
Once you have all of these basics down,
you'll be all set to apply these tools to answering your very own data science questions.
Looking forward to learning with you. Let's get to it.
Hello and welcome to the Data Scientist's Toolbox,: Added to Selection. Press [CTRL + S] to
save as a note

Like
Dislike
Share
Welcome to the Data Scientist’s Toolbox
Hello, and welcome to The Data Scientist’s Toolbox, the first course in the Data Science
Specialization series. Here, we will be going over the basics of data science and introducing
you to the tools that will be used throughout the series.
What is data science?
So the first question you probably need answered going into this course is, “What is Data
Science?” - and that is a great question. To different people, this means different things, but
at its core, data science is using data to answer questions. This is a pretty broad definition,
and that’s because it’s a pretty broad field!
Data science can involve:
 Statistics, computer science, mathematics
 Data cleaning and formatting
 Data visualization
An Economist Special Report sums up this melange of skills well - they state that a data
scientist is broadly defined as someone:
“who combines the skills of software programmer, statistician and storyteller slash artist to
extract the nuggets of gold hidden under mountains of data”
And by the end of these courses, hopefully you will feel equipped to do just that!
Why do we need data science?
One of the reasons for the rise of data science in recent years is the vast amount of data
currently available and being generated. Not only are massive amounts of data being
collected about many aspects of the world and our lives, but we simultaneously have the
rise of inexpensive computing. This has created the perfect storm in which we have rich
data and the tools to analyse it: Rising computer memory capabilities, better processors,
more software and now, more data scientists with the skills to put this to use and answer
questions using this data!
There is a little anecdote that describes the truly exponential growth of data generation we
are experiencing. In the third century BC, the Library of Alexandria was believed to house
the sum of human knowledge. Today, there is enough information in the world to give every
person alive 320 times as much of it as historians think was stored in Alexandria’s entire
collection.
And that is still growing.
What is big data?
We’ll talk a little bit more about big data in a later lecture, but it deserves an introduction
here - since it has been so integral to the rise of data science. There are a few qualities that
characterize big data. The first is volume. As the name implies, big data involves large
datasets - and these large datasets are becoming more and more routine. For example, say
you had a question about online video - well, YouTube has approximately 300 hours of video
uploaded every minute! You would definitely have a lot of data available to you to analyse,
but you can see how this might be a difficult problem to wrangle all of that data!
And this brings us to the second quality of big data: velocity. Data is being generated and
collected faster than ever before. In our YouTube example, new data is coming at you every
minute! In a completely different example, say you have a question about shipping times or
routes. Well, most transport trucks have real time GPS data available - you could in real time
analyse the trucks movements… if you have the tools and skills to do so!
The third quality of big data is variety. In the examples I’ve mentioned so far, you have
different types of data available to you. In the YouTube example, you could be analysing
video or audio, which is a very unstructured data set, or you could have a database of video
lengths, views or comments, which is a much more structured dataset to analyse.
A summary of three qualities that characterize big data
What is a data scientist?
So we’ve talked about what data science is and what sorts of data it deals with, but
something else we need to discuss is what exactly a data scientist is.
The most basic of definitions would be that a data scientist is somebody who uses data to
answer questions. But more importantly to you, what skills does a data scientist embody?
Drew Conway’s Venn diagram of data science
And to answer this, we have this illustrative Venn diagram, in which data science is the
intersection of three sectors - Substantive expertise, hacking skills, and math and statistics.
To explain a little on what we mean by this, we know that we use data science to answer
questions - so first, we need to have enough expertise in the area that we want to ask about
in order to formulate our questions and to know what sorts of data are appropriate to
answer that question. Once we have our question and appropriate data, we know from the
sorts of data that data science works with, often times it needs to undergo significant
cleaning and formatting - and this often takes computer programming slash “hacking” skills.
Finally, once we have our data, we need to analyse it, and this often takes math and stats
knowledge.
In this specialization, we’ll spend a bit of time focusing on each of these three sectors, but
will primarily focus on math and statistics knowledge and hacking skills. For hacking skills,
we’ll focus on teaching two different components: computer programming or at least
computer programming with R, which will allow you to access data, play around with it,
analyze it, and plot it. Additionally, we’ll focus on having you learn how to go out and get
answers to your programming questions.
One reason data scientists are in such demand is that most of the answers aren’t already
outlined in textbooks - a data scientist needs to be somebody who knows how to find
answers to novel problems.
Why do data science?
Speaking of that demand, there is a huge need for individuals with data science skills. Not
only are machine learning engineers, data scientists, and big data engineers among the top
emerging jobs in 2017 according to LinkedIn, the demand far exceeds the supply.
Data scientist roles have grown over 650 percent since 2012, but currently 35,000 people in
the US have data science skills, while hundreds of companies are hiring for those roles -
even those you may not expect in sectors like retail and finance - supply of candidates for
these roles cannot keep up with demand.
This is a great time to be getting in to data science - not only do we have more and more
data, and more and more tools for collecting, storing, and analysing it, but the demand for
data scientists is becoming increasingly recognized as important in many diverse sectors, not
just business and academia.
Additionally, according to Glassdoor, in which they ranked the top 50 best jobs in America,
Data Scientist is THE top job in the US in 2017, based on job satisfaction, salary, and
demand.
Examples of data scientists
The diversity of sectors in which data science is being used is exemplified by looking at
examples of data scientists.
One place we might not immediately recognize the demand for data science is in sports
– Daryl Morey is the general manager of a US basketball team, the Houston Rockets. Despite
not having a strong background in basketball, Morey was awarded the job as GM on the
basis of his bachelor’s degree in computer science and his M.B.A. from M.I.T. He was chosen
for his ability to collect and analyse data, and use that to make informed hiring decisions.
Another data scientist that you may have heard of is Hilary Mason. She is a co-founder of
FastForward labs, a machine learning company recently acquired by Cloudera, a data
science company, and is the Data Scientist in Residence at Accel. Broadly, she uses data to
answer questions about mining the web and understanding the way that humans interact
with each other through social media.
And finally, Nate Silver is one of the most famous data scientists or statisticians in the world
today. He is founder and editor in chief at FiveThirtyEight - A website that
uses statistical analysis - hard numbers - to tell compelling stories about elections, politics,
sports, science, economics and lifestyle.
He uses large amounts of totally free public data to make predictions about a variety of
topics; most notably he makes predictions about who will win elections in the United States,
and has a remarkable track record for accuracy doing so.
Data science in action!
One great example of data science in action is from 2009, in which researchers at Google
analysed 50 million commonly searched terms over a five year period, and compared them
against CDC data on flu outbreaks. Their goal was to see if certain searches coincided with
outbreaks of the flu. One of the benefits of data science and using big data is that it can
identify correlations; in this case, they identified 45 words that had a strong correlation with
the CDC flu outbreak data. With this data, they have been able to predict flu outbreaks
based solely off of common Google searches! Without this mass amounts of data, these 45
words could not have been predicted beforehand.
What will we teach you in this course?
Now that you have had this introduction into data science, all that really remains to cover
here is a summary of what it is that we will be teaching you throughout this course. To start,
we’ll go over the basics of R. R is the main programming language that we will be working
with in this course track, so a solid understanding of what it is, how it works and getting it
installed on your computer is a must. We’ll then transition into RStudio - which is a very nice
graphical interface to R, that should make your life easier! We’ll then talk about version
control, why it is important and how to integrate it into your work. And once you have all of
these basics down, you’ll be all set to apply these tools to answering your very own data
science questions!
Looking forward to learning with you! Let’s get to it!
What is data?
Since we’ve spent some time discussing what data science is, we should spend some time
looking at what exactly data is.
Definitions of “data”
First, let’s look at what a few trusted sources consider data to be.
First up, we’ll look at the Cambridge English Dictionary, which states that data is:
Information, especially facts or numbers, collected to be examined and considered and used
to help decision-making.
Second, we’ll look at the definition provided by Wikipedia, which is:
A set of values of qualitative or quantitative variables.
These are slightly different definitions and they get at different components of what data is.
Both agree that data is values or numbers or facts, but the Cambridge definition focuses on
the actions that surround data - data is collected, examined and most importantly, used to
inform decisions. We’ve focused on this aspect before - we’ve talked about how the most
important part of data science is the question and how all we are doing is using data to
answer the question. The Cambridge definition focuses on this.
The Wikipedia definition focuses more on what data entails. And although it is a fairly short
definition, we’ll take a second to parse this and focus on each component individually.
So, the first thing to focus on is “a set of values” - to have data, you need a set of items to
measure from. In statistics, this set of items is often called the population. The set as a
whole is what you are trying to discover something about. For example, that set of items
required to answer your question might be all websites or it might be the set of all people
coming to websites, or it might be a set of all people getting a particular drug. But in
general, it’s a set of things that you’re going to make measurements on.
The next thing to focus on is “variables” - variables are measurements or characteristics of
an item. For example, you could be measuring the height of a person, or you are measuring
the amount of time a person stays on a website. On the other hand, it might be a more
qualitative characteristic you are trying to measure, like what a person clicks on on a
website, or whether you think the person visiting is male or female.
Finally, we have both qualitative and quantitative variables. Qualitative variables are,
unsurprisingly, information about qualities. They are things like country of origin, sex, or
treatment group. They’re usually described by words, not numbers, and they are not
necessarily ordered. Quantitative variables on the other hand, are information about
quantities. Quantitative measurements are usually described by numbers and are measured
on a continuous, ordered scale; they’re things like height, weight and blood pressure.

A summary of the concepts present in the Wikipedia definition of data

So, taking this whole definition into consideration we have measurements (either qualitative
or quantitative) on a set of items making up data - not a bad definition.
What can data look like? (rarely)
When we were going over the definitions, our examples of variables and measurements
(country of origin, sex, height, weight) are pretty basic examples; you can easily envision
them in a nice looking spreadsheet, with individuals along one side of the table, and the
information for those variables along the other side.
An example of a structured dataset - a spreadsheet of individuals (first initial, last name)
and their country of origin, sex, height, and weight)
Unfortunately, this is rarely how data is presented to you. The data sets we commonly
encounter are much messier, and it is our job to extract the information we want, corral it
into something tidy like the imagined table above, analyse it appropriately, and often,
visualize our results.
More common types of messy data
Here are just some of the data sources you might encounter and we’ll briefly look at what a
few of these data sets often look like or how they can be interpreted, but one thing they
have in common is the messiness of the data - you have to work to extract the information
you need to answer your question.
 Sequencing data
 Population census data
 Electronic medical records (EMR), other large databases
 Geographic information system (GIS) data (mapping)
 Image analysis and image extrapolation
 Language and translations
 Website traffic
 Personal/Ad data (eg: Facebook, Netflix predictions, etc)
Messy data: Sequencing
One type of data, that I work with regularly, is sequencing data. This data is generally first
encountered in the FASTQ format, the raw file format produced by sequencing machines.
These files are often hundreds of millions of lines long, and it is our job to parse this into an
understandable and interpretable format and infer something about that individual’s
genome. In this case, this data was interpreted into expression data, and produced a plot
called a “volcano plot”.

A volcano plot is produced at the end of a long process to wrangle the raw FASTQ data
into interpretable expression data
Messy data: Census information
One rich source of information is country wide censuses. In these, almost all members of a
country answer a set of standardized questions and submit these answers to the
government. When you have that many respondants, the data is large and messy; but once
this large database is ready to be queried, the answers embedded are [Link] we
have a very basic result of the last US census - in which all respondants are divided by sex
and age, and this distribution is plotted in this population pyramid plot.
The US population is stratified by sex and age to produce a population pyramid plot
Here is the US census website and some tools to help you examine it, but if you aren’t from
the US, I urge you to check out your home country’s census bureau (if available) and look at
some of the data there!
Messy data: Electronic medical records (EMR)
Electronic medical records are increasingly prevalent as a way to store health information,
and more and more population based studies are using this data to answer questions and
make inferences about populations at large, or as a method to identify ways to improve
medical care. For example, if you are asking about a population’s common allergies, you will
have to extract many individuals’ allergy information, and put that into an easily
interpretable table format where you will then perform your analysis.
Messy data: Image analysis/extrapolation
A more complex data source to analyse are images/videos. There is a wealth of information
coded in an image or video, and it is just waiting to be extracted. An example of image
analysis that you may be familiar with is when you upload a picture to Facebook and not
only does it automatically recognize faces in the picture, but then suggests who they may
be. A fun example you can play with is the DeepDream software that was originally designed
to detect faces in an image, but has since moved on to more artistic pursuits.
The DeepDream software is trained on your image and a famous painting and your
provided image is then rendered in the style of the famous painter
There is another fun Google initiative involving image analysis, where you help provide data
to Google’s machine learning algorithm… by doodling!
Data is of secondary importance
Recognizing that we’ve spent a lot of time going over what data is, we need to reiterate -
Data is important, but it is secondary to your question. A good data scientist asks questions
first and seeks out relevant data second.
Admittedly, often the data available will limit, or perhaps even enable, certain questions you
are trying to ask. In these cases, you may have to reframe your question or answer a related
question, but the data itself does not drive the question asking.
Summary
In this lesson we focused on data - both in defining it and in exploring what data may look
like and how it can be used.
First, we looked at two definitions of data, one that focuses on the actions surrounding data,
and another on what comprises data. The second definition embeds the concepts of
populations, variables, and looks at the differences between quantitative and qualitative
data.
Second, we examined different sources of data that you may encounter, and emphasized
the lack of tidy datasets. Examples of messy datasets, where raw data needs to be wrangled
into an interpretable form, can include sequencing data, census data, electronic medical
records, etc. And finally, we return to our beliefs on the relationship between data and your
question and emphasize the importance of question-first strategies. You could have all the
data you could ever hope for, but if you don’t have a question to start, the data is useless.
Getting help
One of the main skills you are going to be called upon for as a data scientist is your ability to
solve problems. And sometimes to do that, you need help. The ability to solve problems is at
the root of data science; so the importance of being able to do so is paramount. In this
lesson, we are going to equip you with some strategies to help you when you get stuck with
a problem and need some help! Much of this information has been compiled from Roger
Peng’s video on “Getting Help” and Eric Raymond’s “How to ask questions the smart way” -
so definitely check out those resources!
Why is knowing how to get help important?
First off, this course is not like a standard class you have taken before where there may be
30 to 100 people and you have access to your professor for immediate help. In this class, at
any one time there can be thousands of students taking the class; no one person could
provide help to all of these people, all of the time! So we’ll introduce you to some strategies
to deal with getting help in this course.
Also, as we said earlier, being able to solve problems is often one of the core skills of a data
scientist. Data science is new; you may be the first person to come across a specific problem
and you need to be equipped with skills that allow you to tackle problems that are both new
to you and to the community!
Finally, troubleshooting and figuring out solutions to problems is a great, transferable skill! It
will serve you well as a data scientist, but so much of what any job often entails is problem
solving. Being able to think about problems and get help effectively is of benefit to you in
whatever career path you find yourself in!
Before you ask for help
Before you begin asking others for help on your problem, there are a few steps you can take
on your own. Oftentimes, the fastest answer is one you find for yourself.
One of your first stops for data analysis problems should be reading the manuals or help
files (for R problems, try typing ?command) – if you post a question on a forum that is easily
answered by the manual, you will often get a reply of “Read the manual” … which is not the
easiest way to get at the answer you were going for!
Next steps are searching on Google and searching relevant forums. Common forums for
data science problems include StackOverflow and CrossValidated. Additionally, for you in
this class, there is a course forum that is a great resource and super helpful! Before posting
a question to any forum, try and double check that it hasn’t been asked before, using the
forums’ search functions.
While you are Googling, things to pay attention to and look for are: tutorials, FAQs, or
vignettes of whatever command or program is giving you trouble. These are great resources
to get you started – either in telling you the language/words to use in your next searches, or
outright showing you how to do something.
First steps for solving coding problems
As you get further into this course and using R, you may run into coding problems and errors
and there are a few strategies you should have ready to deal with these. In my experience,
coding problems generally fall into two categories: your command produces no data and
spits out an error message OR your command produces an output, but it is not at all what
you wanted. These two problems have different strategies for dealing with them.
If it’s a problem producing an error message:
 Check for typos!
 Read the error message and make sure you understand it
 Google the error message, exactly
I’ve been there – you type out a command and all you get are lines and lines of angry red
text telling you that you did something wrong. And this can be overwhelming. But taking a
second to check over your command for typos and then carefully reading the error message
solves the problem in nearly all of the cases. The error messages are there to help you – it is
the computer telling you what went wrong. And when all else fails, you can be pretty
assured that somebody out there got the same error message, panicked and posted to a
forum – the answer is out there.
On the other hand, if you get an output, but it isn’t what you expected:
 Consider how the output was different from what you expected
 Think about what it looks like the command actually did, why it would do that, and
not what you wanted
Most problems like this are because the command you provided told the program to do one
thing and it did that thing exactly… it just turns out what you told it to do wasn’t actually
what you wanted! These problems are often the most frustrating – you are so close but so
far! The quickest way to figuring out what went wrong is looking at the output you did get,
comparing it to what you wanted, and thinking about how the program may have produced
that output instead of what you wanted. These sorts of problems give you plenty of practice
thinking like a computer program!
Next steps
Alright, you’ve done everything you are supposed to do to solve the problem on your own –
you need to bring in the big guns now: other people!
Easiest is to find a peer with some experience with what you are working on and ask them
for help/direction. This is often great because the person explaining gets to solidify their
understanding while teaching it to you, and you get a hands on experience seeing how they
would solve the problem. In this class, your peers can be your classmates and you can
interact with them through the course forum (double check your question hasn’t been
asked already!).
But, outside of this course, you may not have too many data science savvy peers – what
then?
“Rubber duck debugging” is a long held tradition of solitary programmers everywhere. In
the book “The Pragmatic Programmer,” there is a story of how stumped programmers
would explain their problem to a rubber duck, and in the process of explaining the problem,
identify the solution.
Wikipedia explains it well:
Many programmers have had the experience of explaining a programming problem to
someone else, possibly even to someone who knows nothing about programming, and then
hitting upon the solution in the process of explaining the problem. In describing what the
code is supposed to do and observing what it actually does, any incongruity between these
two becomes apparent.
So next time you are stumped, bring out the bath toys!
When all else fails: posting to forums
You’ve done your best. You’ve searched and searched. You’ve talked with peers. You’ve
done everything possible to figure it out on your own. And you are still stuck. It’s time. Time
to post your question to a relevant forum.
Before you go ahead and just post your question, you need to consider how you can best
ask your question to garner (helpful) answers.
How to effectively ask questions on forums
Details to include:
 The question you are trying to answer
 How you approached the problem, what steps you have already taken to answer the
question
 What steps will reproduce the problem (including sample data for troubleshooters to
work from!)
 What was the expected output
 What you saw instead (including any error messages you received!)
 What troubleshooting steps you have already tried
 Details about your set-up, eg: what operating system you are using, what version of
the product you have installed (eg: R, Rpackages)
  Be specific in the title of your questions!
How to title forum posts
Most of these details are self-explanatory, but there can be an art to titling your posting.
Without being specific, you don’t give your potential helpers a lot to go off of – they don’t
really know what the problem is and if they are able to help you.
Bad:
 HELP! Can’t fit linear model!
 HELP! Don’t understand PCA!
These titles don’t give your potential helpers a lot to go off of – they don’t really know what
the problem is and if they are able to help you. Instead, you need to provide some details
about what you are having problems with. Answering what you were doing and what the
problem is are two key pieces of information that you need to provide. This way somebody
who is on the forum will know exactly what is happening and that they might be able to
help!
Better:
 R 3.4.3 lm() function produces seg fault with large data frame (Windows 10)
 Applied PCA to a matrix - what are U, D, and Vt?
Even better:
 R 3.4.3 lm() function on Windows 10 – seg fault on large dataframe
 Using principle components to discover common variation in rows of a matrix,
should I use, U, D or Vt?
Use titles that focus on the very specific core problem that you are trying to get help with. It
signals to people that you are looking for a very specific answer; the more specific the
question, often, the faster the answer.
Forum etiquette
Following a lot of the tips above will serve you well in posting on forums and
observing forum etiquette. You are asking for help, you are hoping somebody else will take
time out of their day to help you – you need to be courteous. Often this takes the form of
asking specific questions, doing some troubleshooting of your own, and giving potential
problem solvers easy access to all the information they need to help you. Formalizing some
of these do’s and don’t’s, you get the following lists:
Do’s
 Read the forum posting guidelines
 Make sure you are asking your question on an appropriate forum!
  Describe the goal
 Be explicit and detailed in your explanation
 Provide the minimum information required to describe (and replicate) the problem
 Be courteous! (Please and thank you!)
 Follow up on the post OR post the solution
Let’s take a few seconds to talk a bit about this last point, as we have touched on the others
already. First, what do we mean by “follow up on the post”? You’ve asked your question and
you’ve received several answers and lo and behold one of them works! You are all set, get
back to work! No! Go back to your posting, reply to the solution that worked for you,
explaining that they fixed your problem and thanking them for their solution! Not only do
the people helping you deserve thanks, but this is helpful to anybody else who has the same
problem as you, later on. They are going to do their due diligence, search the forum and find
your post – it is so helpful for you to have flagged the answer that solved your problem.
Conversely, while you are waiting for a reply, perhaps you stumble upon the solution (go
you!) – don’t just close the posting or never check back on it. One, people who are trying to
help you may be replying and you are functionally ignoring them, or two, if you close it with
no solution, somebody with the same problem won’t ever learn what your solution was!
Make sure to post the solution and thank everybody for their help!
Don’t’s:
 Immediately assume you have found a bug
 Post homework questions
 Cross post on multiple forums
 Repost if you don’t immediately get a response
These are all pretty clear guidelines. Nobody wants to help somebody who assumes that the
root cause of the problem isn’t because they have made a mistake, but that there is
something wrong with a program. Spoiler alert, it’s (almost) always because you made a
mistake. Similarly, nobody wants to do your homework for you, they want to help
somebody who is genuinely trying to learn – not find a short cut.
Additionally, for people who are active on multiple forums, it is always aggravating when the
same person posts the same question on five different forums…. Or when the same
question is posted on the same forum repeatedly. Be patient – pick the most relevant forum
for your purposes, post once, and wait.
Summary
In this lesson, we look at how to effectively get help when you run into a problem. This is
important for this course, but also for your future as a data scientist!
We first looked at strategies to use before asking for help, including reading the manual,
checking the help files, and searching Google and appropriate forums. We also covered
some common coding problems you may face and some preliminary steps you can take on
your own, including paying special attention to error messages and examining how your
code behaved compared to your goal.
Once you’ve exhausted these options, we turn to other people for help. We can ask peers
for help or explain our problems to our trusty rubber ducks (be it an actual rubber duck or
an unsuspecting coworker!). Our course forum is also a great resource for you all to talk
with many of your peers! Go introduce yourself!
And if all else fails, we can post on forums (be it in this class or at another forum, like
StackOverflow), with very specific, reproducible questions. Before doing so, be sure to brush
up on your forum etiquette - it never hurt anybody to be polite! Be a good citizen of our
forums!
There is an art to problem solving, and the only way to get practice is to get out there and
start solving problems! Get to it!
The Data Science Process
In the first few lessons of this course we discussed what data and data science are, and ways
to get help. What we haven’t yet covered is what an actual data science project looks like.
To do so, we’ll first step through an actual data science project, breaking down the parts of
a typical project and then provide a number of links to other interesting data science
projects. Our goal in this lesson is to expose you to the process one goes through as they
carry out data science projects.
The Parts of a Data Science Project
Every Data Science Project starts with a question that is to be answered with data. That
means that forming the question is an important first step in the process. The second step
is finding or generating the data you’re going to use to answer that question. With the
question solidified and data in hand, the data are then analyzed, first by exploring the
data and then often by modeling the data, which means using some statistical or machine
learning techniques to analyze the data and answer your question. After drawing
conclusions from this analysis, the project has to be communicated to others. Sometimes
this is a report you send to your boss or team at work. Other times it’s a blog post. Often it’s
a presentation to a group of colleagues. Regardless, a data science project almost always
involves some form of communication of the projects’ findings. We’ll walk through these
steps using a data science project example below.
A Data Science Project Example
For this example, we’re going to use an example analysis from a data scientist named Hilary
Parker. Her work can be found on her blog, and the specific project we’ll be working through
here is from 2013 and titled “Hilary: the most poisoned baby name in US history”. To get the
most out of this lesson, click on that link and read through Hilary’s post. Once you’re done,
come on back to this lesson and read through the breakdown of this post.

Hilary’s blog post

The Question
When setting out on a data science project, it’s always great to have your question well-
defined. Additional questions may pop up as you do the analysis, but knowing what you
want to answer with your analysis is a really important first step. Hilary Parker’s question is
included in bold in her post. Highlighting this makes it clear that she’s interested in answer
the following question:
Is Hilary/Hillary really the most rapidly poisoned name in recorded American history?
The Data
To answer this question, Hilary collected data from the Social Security website. This dataset
included the 1,000 most popular baby names from 1880 until 2011.
Data Analysis
As explained in the blog post, Hilary was interested in calculating the relative risk for each of
the 4,110 different names in her dataset from one year to the next from 1880 to 2011. By
hand, this would be a nightmare. Thankfully, by writing code in R, all of which is available on
GitHub, Hilary was able to generate these values for all these names across all these years.
It’s not important at this point in time to fully understand what a relative risk calculation is
(although Hilary does a great job breaking it down in her post!), but it is important to know
that after getting the data together, the next step is figuring out what you need to do with
that data in order to answer your question. For Hilary’s question, calculating the relative risk
for each name from one year to the next from 1880 to 2011 and looking at the percentage
of babies named each name in a particular year would be what she needed to do to answer
her question.

Hilary’s GitHub repo for this project

Exploratory Data Analysis
What you don’t see in the blog post is all of the code Hilary wrote to get the data from
the Social Security website, to get it in the format she needed to do the analysis, and to
generate the figures. As mentioned above, she made all this code available on GitHub so
that others could see what she did and repeat her steps if they wanted. In addition to this
code, data science projects often involve writing a lot of code and generating a lot of figures
that aren’t included in your final results. This is part of the data science process too. Figuring
out how to do what you want to do to answer your question of interest is part of the
process, doesn’t always show up in your final project, and can be very time-consuming.
Data Analysis Results
That said, given that Hilary now had the necessary values calculated, she began to analyze
the data. The first thing she did was look at the names with the biggest drop in percentage
from one year to the next. By this preliminary analysis, Hilary was sixth on the list, meaning
there were five other names that had had a single year drop in popularity larger than the
one the name “Hilary” experienced from 1992 to 1993.
Biggest Drop Table
In looking at the results of this analysis, the first five years appeared peculiar to Hilary
Parker. (It’s always good to consider whether or not the results were what you were
expecting, from any analysis!) None of them seemed to be names that were popular for
long periods of time. To see if this hunch was true, Hilary plotted the percent of babies born
each year with each of the names from this table. What she found was that, among these
“poisoned” names (names that experienced a big drop from one year to the next in
popularity), all of the names other than Hilary became popular all of a sudden and then
dropped off in popularity. Hilary Parker was able to figure out why most of these other
names became popular, so definitely read that section of her post! The name, Hilary,
however, was different. It was popular for a while and then completely dropped off in
popularity.
14 most poisoned names over time
To figure out what was specifically going on with the name Hilary, she removed names that
became popular for short periods of time before dropping off, and only looked at names
that were in the top 1,000 for more than 20 years. The results from this analysis definitively
show that Hilary had the quickest fall from popularity in 1992 of any female baby name
between 1880 and 2011. (“Marian”’s decline was gradual over many years.)
39 most poisoned names over time, controlling for fads
Communication
For the final step in this data analysis process, once Hilary Parker had answered her
question, it was time to share it with the world. An important part of any data science
project is effectively communicating the results of the project. Hilary did so by writing a
wonderful blog post that communicated the results of her analysis, answered the question
she set out to answer, and did so in an entertaining way.
Additionally, it’s important to note that most projects build off someone else’s work.
It’s really important to give those people credit. Hilary accomplishes this by:
- linking to a blog post where someone had asked a similar question previously
- linking to the Social Security website where she got the data
- linking to where she learned about web scraping
What you can build using R
Hilary’s work was carried out using the R programming language. Throughout the courses in
this series, you’ll learn the basics of programming in R, exploring and analysing data, and
how to build reports and web applications that allow you to effectively communicate your
results. To give you an example of the types of things that can be built using the R
programming and suite of available tools that use R, below are a few examples of the types
of things that have been built using the data science process and the R programming
language - the types of things that you’ll be able to generate by the end of this series of
courses.
Prediction Risk of Opioid Overdoses in Providence, RI
Masters students at the University of Pennsylvania set out to predict the risk of opioid
overdoses in Providence, Rhode Island. They include details on the data they used, the steps
they took to clean their data, their visualization process, and their final results. While the
details aren’t important now, seeing the process and what types of reports can be
generated is important. Additionally, they’ve created a Shiny App, which is an interactive
web application. This means that you can choose what neighborhood in Providence you
want to focus on. All of this was built using R programming.
Prediction of Opioid Overdoses in Providence, RI
Other Cool Data Science Projects
The following are smaller projects than the example above, but data science projects
nonetheless! In each project, the author had a question they wanted to answer and used
data to answer that question. They explored, visualized, and analysed the data. Then, they
wrote blog posts to communicate their findings. Take a look to learn more about the topics
listed and to see how others work through the data science project process and
communicate their results!
 Text analysis of Trump’s tweets confirms he writes only the (angrier) Android half ,
by David Robinson
 Where to Live in the US, by Maelle Salmon
 Sexual Health Clinics in Toronto, by Sharla Gelfand
Summary
In this lesson, we hope we’ve conveyed that sometimes data science projects are tackling
difficult questions (‘Can we predict the risk of opioid overdose?’) while other times the goal
of the project is to answer a question you’re interested in personally (‘Is Hilary the most
rapidly poisoned baby name in recorded American history?’). In either case, the process is
similar. You have to form your question, get data, explore and analyse your data, and
communicate your results. With the tools you’ll learn in this series of courses, you w