Course Description:

What is all this hype about “data science?”  What does data science even mean?  We have massive amounts of data about many aspects of our lives and, simultaneously, an abundance of inexpensive computing power.  We have data from the medical industry, social welfare, education, pharmaceuticals, Uber, purchases made on Amazon, just to name a few.  The data scientist’s job is to take all of this data and extract meaningful and accurate information from it.  This is a difficult job, and one that requires responsibility and tremendous care. How would you like to develop the tools to predict patients at risk for breast cancer? Did one of the most influential and widely regarded composers in the history of Western music, Josquin dez Prey, actually compose all of the musical scores attributed to him?  What artifacts from an archaeological dig are likely to have been created by a Pueblo tribe?  How do banks determine whether a client should be granted a loan?  What does it mean to learn? We will address some of these questions and others in this exciting, practical course.  We will learn how to clean data, visualize data, look for underlying patterns in the data, and, finally, use machine learning techniques to model data.  We will use R as our computing language for the class.  The class is a 3-credit course and can be counted as an SIE technical elective.