Data Science For Undergraduates

Data science is emerging as a field that is revolutionizing science and industries alike. Work across nearly all domains is becoming more data driven, affecting both the jobs that are available and the skills that are required. As more data and ways of analyzing them become available, more aspects of the economy, society, and daily life will become dependent on data. It is imperative that educators, administrators, and students begin today to consider how to best prepare for and keep pace with this data-driven era of tomorrow. Undergraduate teaching, in particular, offers a critical link in offering more data science exposure to students and expanding the supply of data science talent. Data Science for Undergraduates: Opportunities and Options offers a vision for the emerging discipline of data science at the undergraduate level. This report outlines some considerations and approaches for academic institutions and others in the broader data science communities to help guide the ongoing transformation of this field.

The need to manage, analyze, and extract knowledge from data is pervasive across industry, government, and academia. Scientists, engineers, and executives routinely encounter enormous volumes of data, and new techniques and tools are emerging to create knowledge out of these data, some of them capable of working with real-time streams of data. The nation's ability to make use of these data depends on the availability of an educated workforce with necessary expertise. With these new capabilities have come novel ethical challenges regarding the effectiveness and appropriateness of broad applications of data analyses. The field of data science has emerged to address the proliferation of data and the need to manage and understand it. Data science is a hybrid of multiple disciplines and skill sets, draws on diverse fields (including computer science, statistics, and mathematics), encompasses topics in ethics and privacy, and depends on specifics of the domains to which it is applied. Fueled by the explosion of data, jobs that involve data science have proliferated and an array of data science programs at the undergraduate and graduate levels have been established. Nevertheless, data science is still in its infancy, which suggests the importance of envisioning what the field might look like in the future and what key steps can be taken now to move data science education in that direction. This study will set forth a vision for the emerging discipline of data science at the undergraduate level. This interim report lays out some of the information and comments that the committee has gathered and heard during the first half of its study, offers perspectives on the current state of data science education, and poses some questions that may shape the way data science education evolves in the future. The study will conclude in early 2018 with a final report that lays out a vision for future data science education.

An introductory textbook offering a low barrier entry to data science; the hands-on approach will appeal to students from a range of disciplines.

Learn how to use R to turn raw data into insight, knowledge, and understanding. This book introduces you to R, RStudio, and the tidyverse, a collection of R packages designed to work together to make data science fast, fluent, and fun. Suitable for readers with no previous programming experience, R for Data Science is designed to get you doing data science as quickly as possible. Authors Hadley Wickham and Garrett Grolemund guide you through the steps of importing, wrangling, exploring, and modeling your data and communicating the results. You'll get a complete, big-picture understanding of the data science cycle, along with basic tools you need to manage the details. Each section of the book is paired with exercises to help you practice what you've learned along the way. You'll learn how to: Wrangle—transform your datasets into a form convenient for analysis Program—learn powerful R tools for solving data problems with greater clarity and ease Explore—examine your data, generate hypotheses, and quickly test them Model—provide a low-dimensional summary that captures true "signals" in your dataset Communicate—learn R Markdown for integrating prose, code, and results

Data Science in Education Using R is the go-to reference for learning data science in the education field. The book answers questions like: What does a data scientist in education do? How do I get started learning R, the popular open-source statistical programming language? And what does a data analysis project in education look like? If you’re just getting started with R in an education job, this is the book you’ll want with you. This book gets you started with R by teaching the building blocks of programming that you’ll use many times in your career. The book takes a "learn by doing" approach and offers eight analysis walkthroughs that show you a data analysis from start to finish, complete with code for you to practice with. The book finishes with how to get involved in the data science community and how to integrate data science in your education job. This book will be an essential resource for education professionals and researchers looking to increase their data analysis skills as part of their professional and academic development.

Data Science: A First Introduction focuses on using the R programming language in Jupyter notebooks to perform data manipulation and cleaning, create effective visualizations, and extract insights from data using classification, regression, clustering, and inference. The text emphasizes workflows that are clear, reproducible, and shareable, and includes coverage of the basics of version control. All source code is available online, demonstrating the use of good reproducible project workflows. Based on educational research and active learning principles, the book uses a modern approach to R and includes accompanying autograded Jupyter worksheets for interactive, self-directed learning. The book will leave readers well-prepared for data science projects. The book is designed for learners from all disciplines with minimal prior knowledge of mathematics and programming. The authors have honed the material through years of experience teaching thousands of undergraduates in the University of British Columbia’s DSCI100: Introduction to Data Science course.

This accessible and classroom-tested textbook/reference presents an introduction to the fundamentals of the emerging and interdisciplinary field of data science. The coverage spans key concepts adopted from statistics and machine learning, useful techniques for graph analysis and parallel programming, and the practical application of data science for such tasks as building recommender systems or performing sentiment analysis. Topics and features: provides numerous practical case studies using real-world data throughout the book; supports understanding through hands-on experience of solving data science problems using Python; describes techniques and tools for statistical analysis, machine learning, graph analysis, and parallel programming; reviews a range of applications of data science, including recommender systems and sentiment analysis of text data; provides supplementary code resources and data at an associated website.

This book covers the topic of data science in a comprehensive manner and synthesizes both fundamental and advanced topics of a research area that has now reached its maturity. The book starts with the basic concepts of data science. It highlights the types of data and their use and importance, followed by a discussion on a wide range of applications of data science and widely used techniques in data science. Key Features • Provides an internationally respected collection of scientific research methods, technologies and applications in the area of data science. • Presents predictive outcomes by applying data science techniques to real-life applications. • Provides readers with the tools, techniques and cases required to excel with modern artificial intelligence methods. • Gives the reader a variety of intelligent applications that can be designed using data science and its allied fields. The book is aimed primarily at advanced undergraduates and graduates studying machine learning and data science. Researchers and professionals will also find this book useful.