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ALX Data Science Course Overview

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175 views12 pages

ALX Data Science Course Overview

Uploaded by

tarekrecovery21
Copyright
© All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

Requirements

This course and its subject matter are technical in nature. It is recommended that you have a
basic understanding of mathematics and statistics.

• Basic computer literacy (using a web browser, operating an email


account, downloading files, etc.).
• A current email account.
Basic • Access to a computer, the internet, and PDF reader software.
1 requirements
• Access to the Google office productivity apps (Docs, Sheets,
Slides – freely accessible to anyone with a Google account).
• Google Chrome to access the learning management system,
though any popular browser should suffice.

• OS: Windows 10 recommended (Windows 7 minimum), in order


to use Power BI; MacOS running Parallels for Windows will also
suffice.
Technical
2 requirements • Processor: Minimum i3, with a minimum clock speed of 2 GHz.
• RAM: Minimum 4 GB.
• Internet: A 10 Mbps line speed and 20 GB of data per month.

Please note that Google, Vimeo, and YouTube may be used in our
course delivery, and if these services are blocked in your jurisdiction
Additional or on your device, you may have difficulty accessing course content.
3 requirements
Please check with us before registering for this course if you have any
concerns about access restrictions affecting your experience with our
learning management system.

5
ExploreAI Academy | [Link]
Curriculum overview
This course will provide students with the knowledge, skills, and experience to get a job as a data scientist,
which requires a mix of programming and statistical understanding. The course will teach students to
gather data, visualise data, apply statistical analysis to answer questions, and make their insights and
information as actionable as possible. We cover the fundamentals of the data scientist’s toolkit as well as
a broad set of machine learning algorithms.

Duration: 11 months
Pre-requisite skills: Basic analytical background
Course difficulty: Advanced
Tools learned: Google Sheets, Python, Jupyter Notebooks, MySQL, Power BI

Phase Module Duration Recommended time


(Weeks) (Hours)

Explore101 1 15

Preparing data 2 70

Fundamentals
SQL 5 175

Data visualisation
4 140
and storytelling

Python 8 280

Regression 5 175

Natural language
Machine learning processing and 5 175
classification
Unsupervised
5 175
learning

Cloud practitioner AWS foundations 5 175

Consolidation Integrated exams 2 70

6
ExploreAI Academy | [Link]
Module 1

Explore101
What is covered in this module:

Orientation
• Setting up your learning environment
• ExploreAI teaching philosophy and educational support framework
• Troubleshooting at ExploreAI Academy

Introduction to data and data analytics


• What is data and how it is used to make data-driven decisions
• An introduction to modern data practices and practitioners
• Approaches to data analysis

Problem-solving
• Mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive statements and
decisions
• Design thinking and the scientific method
• Introduction to solution-oriented communication

Programmatic thinking
• How to use algorithms and operators
• Flowcharts, pseudocode, and conditional statements
• Converting logic between statements, logic trees, pseudocode,
and flowcharts

7
ExploreAI Academy | [Link]
Module 2

Preparing data
What is covered in this module:

Introduction to spreadsheets
• Working with spreadsheets
• Data types and formatting
• Introduction to visualisation

Data manipulation
• Cleaning and analysing spreadsheet data
• Working with various data types
• Finding and fixing data anomalies

Introduction to statistics
• Summarising data using descriptive statistics
• Measures of central tendency and spread
• Samples and distributions

Introduction to data modelling


• Basic spreadsheet functions and conditionals
• Identifying patterns and the line of best fit
• Testing assumptions and model accuracy

8
ExploreAI Academy | [Link]
Module 3

SQL
What is covered in this module:

Introduction to SQL
• Working with databases
• Basic SQL data types and calculations
• Aggregating, sorting, and grouping data

Relational database design


• SQL schemas and entity relationships
• Table normalisation, primary and foreign keys
• Common table expressions and views

SQL in practice
• Set theory and SQL joins
• Nested and subqueries
• Improving query performance

Data manipulation
• Cleaning and analysing data
• Working with numeric, time, and string data types
• Data transformations and anomalies

9
ExploreAI Academy | [Link]
Module 4

Data visualisation and


storytelling
What is covered in this module:

Data in Power BI
• Loading and linking datasets in Power BI
• Cleaning data and creating calculated columns and measures
using DAX
• Reports, data, and relationship views

Visuals in Power BI
• Numeric visuals – cards, tables
• Graphic visuals – line chart, bar chart, pie chart, column chart,
treemap
• Using slicers and custom visuals

Dashboards
• Planning, designing, and prototyping
• Working with various charts
• Working with filters

Visual storytelling
• Telling a story with visuals
• When to use which visuals
• Presentation best-practice

10
ExploreAI Academy | [Link]
Module 5

Python
What is covered in this module:

Python programming basics


• Working in a Notebook environment
• Pseudo code and debugging concepts
• Working with primitive data types – variables, strings, integers,
floating points, booleans

Functions and control flow


• Creating and working with functions
• Conditional statements
• For loops and while loops

Data structures
• Lists, tuples, sets, and dictionaries
• Working with DataFrames
• Plots and graphs

Exploratory data analysis


• Statistical measures, probabilities, and hypotheses
• Algorithms and algorithmic complexity
• Advanced interactive visual analysis

11
ExploreAI Academy | [Link]
Module 6

Regression
What is covered in this module:

Steps to build a model


• Statistical learning, univariate and multivariate analysis
• Training models, making predictions, testing accuracy
• Variable significance and selection

Preparing data for modelling


• Defining or engineering features and labels
• Scaling, standardisation, and regularisation techniques
• Splitting data for training, testing, and validation

Algorithms for regression models


• K-nearest neighbours
• Decision trees and random forests
• Support vector machines

Model tuning
• Model performance metrics
• Bias and variance
• Hyperparameter tuning

12
ExploreAI Academy | [Link]
Module 7

Natural language processing


and classification
What is covered in this module:

An overview of natural language processing


• Removing punctuation and symbols
• Stopwords and regular expressions
• Tokenizing text

Analysing text
• Lemmatisation of words
• Bag of words
• Sentiment analysis

Basic classification
• Logistic regression and binary classification models
• Testing model output: confusion matrix, classification report
• Feature engineering and selection

Advanced classification
• Hyperparameters and model validation
• Dealing with imbalanced data and multi-class classification
• Neural networks and image classification

13
ExploreAI Academy | [Link]
Module 8

Unsupervised learning
What is covered in this module:

Dimensionality reduction
• Principal component analysis
• Multidimensional scaling
• Interpreting nonlinear transformations and embeddings

Hard and hierarchical clustering


• What is clustering?
• K-means clustering
• Hierarchical clustering

Soft clustering
• Gaussian mixture models
• Linear discriminant analysis and text clustering
• Labelling data using cluster output

Recommender systems
• Measures of product similarity
• Content and collaborative-based filtering
• Evaluating a recommender system

14
ExploreAI Academy | [Link]
Module 9

AWS foundations
What is covered in this module:

Cloud computing basics


• Introduction to cloud computing concepts
• Pros and cons of cloud computing
• Popular cloud service providers

Introduction to Amazon Web Services


• Overview of AWS services
• Networking and content delivery
• Economics and billing

Storage and compute resources


• Databases and object storage
• Virtual machines
• Serverless compute resources

Cloud best practice


• Security, identity, and compliance
• Cloud architecture framework
• Automatic scaling and monitoring

15
ExploreAI Academy | [Link]
Module 10

Integrated exams and


certification requirements
What is covered in this module:

Review
• Programme recap
• Opportunity to review content in preparation for exams
• Understanding the final assessment plan

Integrated examination
• Consolidated theory exam
• Practical programming assessment
• Applied machine learning exam

16
ExploreAI Academy | [Link]

Common questions

Powered by AI

The Python module emphasizes skills such as writing and debugging code, working with functions and control flow, and using data structures like lists and DataFrames. These foundational programming skills enable students to perform exploratory data analysis, implement algorithms, and conduct advanced visual analysis, making them indispensable for data science tasks .

The curriculum covers a broad range of topics including data preparation, SQL, data visualization, Python programming, machine learning, and cloud computing, ensuring a holistic skill set. This comprehensive preparation includes practical tools and methodologies aligning with industry standards, enabling graduates to effectively solve real-world data problems and meet the expectations of data science roles .

Knowledge of cloud computing, particularly AWS, is crucial for managing large-scale data operations and leveraging compute resources efficiently. ExploreAI Academy's curriculum incorporates AWS to ensure students can design scalable, compliant, and secure cloud-based data architectures, a vital skill set for data scientists working in diverse industrial settings .

The course integrates mathematical skills by requiring a basic understanding of mathematics and statistics, which are essential for data analysis. The curriculum uses these skills in various modules, such as SQL for data manipulation and Python for exploratory data analysis, to ensure students can perform statistical analyses and understand machine learning algorithms which are crucial for informed data-driven decision-making .

SQL skills taught in the course, such as working with databases, relational database design, and manipulating data through table expressions and joins, enable students to efficiently manage large datasets. These skills support data aggregation, sorting, grouping, and anomaly identification, which are vital for maintaining robust data management and analysis frameworks .

ExploreAI Academy emphasizes modern data practices, data-driven decision-making, and programmatic thinking, including using algorithms, flowcharts, and pseudocode. These approaches help data scientists efficiently manage and interpret large data sets, apply structured problem-solving methods, and create robust data models .

Participants need a computer with at least Windows 7 (Windows 10 recommended) or MacOS running Parallels for Windows. An i3 processor with a minimum clock speed of 2 GHz, 4 GB of RAM, and an internet connection with a 10 Mbps line speed and 20 GB of data per month are also necessary .

Unsupervised learning material enriches a data scientist's toolkit by covering clustering techniques and dimensionality reduction methods, such as PCA and multidimensional scaling. This knowledge enables data scientists to uncover hidden patterns and structures in data without predefined labels, enhancing their ability to derive insights from complex datasets .

ExploreAI Academy prepares students by covering fundamental machine learning algorithms and practical steps in model building, such as data scaling, feature selection, and hyperparameter tuning. This preparation aligns with industry needs by ensuring students can construct, evaluate, and refine predictive models to extract actionable insights from data, critical skills in data science roles .

Visual storytelling in the Power BI module involves using various charts and visuals to convey data insights effectively. It's important for data scientists to create compelling narratives that communicate complex data analysis outcomes in an understandable and engaging manner, facilitating informed decision-making by stakeholders .

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