Data is the currency of today’s business market. Data science, machine learning, and deep learning are driving growth and changing how business is done. You have to be able to understand and keep up with what your team is doing. Even if you don’t plan on becoming a data scientist, analyst, or quant yourself, you must be able to understand what is happening in your organization.
This course is designed to get you up to speed with today’s data technologies, including the most popular programming languages, Python and SQL. This course is designed for those without a programming or data analytics background. While students of all experience-levels are welcome, those with significant coding background may not benefit. You also don’t need to have a strong math or statistics background to be successful in this course.
Although we don’t expect you to become a programmer after leaving this course, you will be writing code every week. If that thought scares you a little, that’s ok, that’s what the instructor and TAs are here to help with!
Because the best way to learn is to do, we will be using real-world datasets. We will carry out analytics, including data cleaning, computing summary statistics, basic visualizations, and basic predictive models (linear and logistic regression). We’ll use real-world APIs and web scraping to pull data from websites you care about.
This course is good preparation for several downstream classes, including Business Statistics (41000), Applied Regression (41100), and Advanced Decision Models with Python (36109).
Please note that a lot of the learning in this course will happen during our weekly sessions, so attendance is mandatory. I understand things happen sometimes, and I don’t want to be the
arbiter of what’s a valid excuse for missing a session, so everyone gets one free pass on attendance for the quarter. Please email me if possible before you miss anyway, just to help me plan.
