Course notes for MATH70098 Data Science

Description

Course notes on effictive data sceience workflows. Hosted at eds-notes.zakvarty.com.

Postgradute courses in statistics and data science tend to focus almost exclusively on modelling. This is in spite of modelling being only a single component in a data science project. This oversight can often leave students unprepared to deliver end-to-end project, whether that is for their dissertation or when entering the workplace.

This course aims to address this shortcoming by guiding students in how to:

1. Effictively manage data sciene workflows

   • Scope a data science project
   • Organise the files and automate workflows
   • Write and pacakge code that is human-friendly and clearly documented

2. Acquire and share data

   • Be familiar with a range of tabular and non-tabular data files
   • Obtain their own data via webscraping and APIs

3. Explore and visualise complex datasets

   • Wrangle messy and non-tabular data
   • Explore and visualise complex data
   • Construct compelling narratives supported by data
   • Target communication to a variety of stakeholders

4. Prepare for production

   • Write reproducible analyses
   • Explain and interpret transparent models
   • Use meta-models to explain black-box models
   • Identify barriers to scalability through code profiling

5. Assess the ethical impacts of data science projects

   • Explain simple techniques to protect data subject privacy
   • Assess fairness of data science models with respect to a protected characteristic
   • Work within professional guidelines and codes of conduct

Getting Started

1. Install Quarto

2. Fork and clone this repo

This will make a remote copy of this repo on your own GitHub account and a local version of that copy on your computer.

3. Preview the notes in your browser

This is the fastest way to view a part of the notes while editing. The notes will update in your browser every time a file is edited and saved.

quarto preview

NOTE: preview is fast but temporary. Make sure to render when you are done.

4. Render the notes

You can render to both pdf and html formats (recommended).

quarto render

Only html of pdf (faster)

quarto render --to-html

quarto render --to-pdf

Contributing

Minor Changes

For small changes such as typos, the easiest way to contribute is to edit directly in github and open a pull request.

Major Changes

For larger changes, follow the getting started steps and before making edits create a new branch.

git branch your-informative-branch-name

git checkout your-informative-branch-name` 
``

If you are still getting used to collaborative workflows with git, check out this helpful guide on [going from fork and clone to a pull request](https://happygitwithr.com/fork-and-clone) by Jenny Bryan.


## Development Ideas 

- 1.2 is long - consider splitting into file names and file extensions.

- 1.3 is long - consider splitting or pulling out functional vs OOP sections.