Intro to Data Science

Intro to data science is an intermediate level course that assumes basic Python programming skills and knowledge of statistics. The course focuses on gathering, manipulating, analyzing and visualizing data using Python and various Python packages such as numpy, scipy and pandas. One of the best parts about this course is getting some exposure to some Python packages in the scipy stack, although I wish more time was devoted to explaining what the various modules in the scipy stack do, how to set them up at home and when to use them.

The first lesson was fairly gentle introduction with an interesting homework project dealing with data from the Titanic disaster. Lesson 2 goes into more detail about gathering and cleaning data using Pandas and an additional module that lets you make SQL queries to extract data from Pandas data frames. Lesson 3 jumps into data analysis with a T test and linear regression using gradient descent. Going from basic data manipulation into these topics was a bit jarring in terms of difficulty and more time could have been spent explaining how the functions worked. I left without a great appreciation of what gradient descent is really doing. Lesson 4 is focused on making visualizations using a module that attempts to port the functionality R language’s ggplot2 plotting package. Finally, lesson 5 introduces the concept of big data and MapReduce as a solution to deal with large data sets. Each homework assignment after the first has students dealing with New York subway turnstile data, which allows students to get some level of familiarity with the data throughout the course. This was a very good decision, since it lets students focus on learning new concepts rather than spending time familiarizing themselves with new data sets over and over again.

I was skeptical when I enrolled in UDACITY's Data Analysis Nano Degree Program but not only have they provided the experience they said they would they have steadily made improvements since I enrolled. How many times in your life have you had that experience? Here are SOME of the improvements they have made while I have been enrolled. Initially one could get one-on-one help but usually it was 1 to 2 days out and but then it was video chat.

This was great. I had tried a competitor's course and sometime s one just cannot figure out why something is not working. But not with Udacity. Then they scrapped that and instituted a MENTOR program. Here one could instant message someone who would get back to you in a few hours. Then they scrapped that and now offer LIVE HELP. It is a chat box that one types the gist of your question into. In less than 10 min, often in 3 min , someone comes on. Usually they can immediately figure out your mistake ( it seems students make a finite # of errors) but if they cant they ask you to copy and paste your code. And if they still cannot figure it out, i.e., if you have really made a mess of things they do a screen sharing session to get you back on the rails . Don't make a mistake. Just sign up for Udacity.