Data Science Without Tears
Welcome, colleagues!
The new year brings new opportunities for learning and professional development.
As part of ongoing efforts to help build data acumen across campus, Western is offering a six-week bootcamp for faculty members and postdocs called “Data Science Without Tears”.
The course takes only eight hours per week over six weeks and will cover the basics of data science. The course includes practical, hands-on exercises in Python notebooks, which are essential tools for data science work that can be accessed through your browser with no installation needed!
The course is designed to be accessible and welcoming for those new to data science. No tears here!
The bootcamp will help you:
- Understand how to scale your research using simple data science tools and techniques in Python
- Automate your data collection and processing in a re-producible workflow
- Summarize and visualize your research
- Understand common machine learning models and how they may apply to your own research
- Learn what resources exist to further your knowledge
Are you ready to take your research to the next level with a better understanding of data science?
Registration
The third session will run for six weeks and begins September 20th, 2021. There will be one synchronous component: “Coffee House Hours”, where you can use that time as dedicated study time or ask the developers questions.
To register, sign up via the following form: Register Here
Requests for further information should be sent to: datasciencewithouttears@gmail.com.
Pre-Requisites
- Knowledge: Basic statistics (e.g. mean, sd, some knowledge of t-tests)
- Software: A web browser (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, etc.)
- A UWO account for OWL access
- A Google account (e.g. Gmail) for Google Colab
- A GitHub account (we will help you set this up)
- Most content will only be available through GitHub
Not required:
- Previous experience with programming languages or any particular software
- Previous experience with GitHub
- A Google account that is associated with any of your personal information
- Any particular software (other than the web browser that you’re using to view this page)
- Installing Python is NOT required, all work can be done in Google Colab.
Topics Covered
This is an inexhaustive list of topics that we cover in this bootcamp:
- The basics of data, including where it comes from, where you store it, and precautions about using it correctly.
- The ethical considerations surrounding the collection and analysis of data.
- Basic Python programming, including the numpy, pandas, matplotlib, and seaborn modules.
- What “Big Data” means, and an introduction to how we deal with it.
- A brief overview of the breadth of models that might be of interest to you.
- A deeper look into linear regression, logistic regression, decision trees, neural networks, and natural language processing.
- How to use GitHub as a version control system, as well as a tool to make collaboration easy.