Introduction to Data Science (in Python)

This page contains an outline of the topics, content, and assignments for the quarter. Note that this schedule will be updated as the quarter progresses, with all changes documented here.

Week Date Required Reading Lecture Slides Lab Activity Weekly Assignment Exams & Project
0 Sunday, January 5 Welcome to DATA 301!
1 Summarizing Tabular Data Tuesday, January 7

Tabular Data & Variable Summaries

GenAI Activity (Link to Collab)

Activity 1.1 (Link to Collab)
Thursday, January 9 Visualizing and Comparing Categorical Variables Activity 1.2 (Link to Collab)

Lab 1A

Lab 1B

Friday, January 10 Lab 1 Due by Midnight
2 Summarizing & Visualizing Quantitative Data

Tuesday, January 14

(Dr. T’s b-day)

Visualizing and Summarizing Quantitative Variables Activity 2.1 (Link to Collab)
Thursday, January 16 Multivariate Summaries Activity 2.2

Lab 2A

Lab 2B

Friday, January 17 Lab 2 Due by Midnight
3
Measuring Similarity with Distances
Tuesday, January 21 No Class (Classes Follow Monday Schedule)
Thursday, January 23 Distances Between Observations

Lecture Activity 3.1
Activity 3.1 Lab 3
Friday, January 24 Lab 3 Due by Midnight
4
Dummy Variables & TF-IDF
Tuesday, January 28 Dummy Variables and Column Transformers Activity 4.1
Thursday, January 30 Bag-of-Words and TF-IDF Activity 4.2

Lab 4A

Lab 4B

Friday, January 31 Lab 4 Due by Midnight
5
K-Nearest Neighbors, Intro to Modeling & Midterm Exam
Tuesday, February 4 K-Nearest-Neighbors Activity 5.1
Thursday, February 6 Introduction to Modeling Activity 5.2 Midterm Exam (in-class)
Friday, February 7 Lab 5 Due by Midnight
6
Classification & Model Selection
Tuesday, February 11 Cross-Validation and Grid Search Activity 6.1
Thursday, February 13 Classification Activity 6.2
Friday, February 14 Lab 6 Due by Midnight
7
Logistic Regression & Unsupervised Learning
Tuesday, February 18 Logistic Regression Activity 7.1
Thursday, February 20 Unsupervised Learning with K-Means Activity 7.2
Friday, February 21 Lab 7 Due by Midnight Project Proposal Due
8
Joining Data & Hierarchical Data
Tuesday, February 25 Combining Datasets Activity 8.1
Thursday, February 27 Hierarchical Data Activity 8.2
Friday, February 28 Lab 8 Due by Midnight
9
Webscraping
Tuesday, March 4 Webscraping Activity 9.1
Thursday, March 6 Activity 9.2
Friday, March 7 Lab 9 Due by Midnight
10
Final Posters & Final Exam
Tuesday, March 11 Posters Due to be Printed
Thursday, March 13 Final Exam (in-class)
Finals Week Saturday, March 15 10:10am - 1pm Poster Presentations