Course Material and Notebooks + Data Science Capstone Project
The art of uncovering the insights and trends in data has been around since ancient times. The ancient Egyptians used census data to increase efficiency in tax collection and they accurately predicted the flooding of the Nile river every year. Since then, people working in data science have carved out a unique and distinct field for the work they do. This field is data science. In this course, we will meet some data science practitioners and we will get an overview of what data science is today.
Despite the recent increase in computing power and access to data over the last couple of decades, our ability to use the data within the decision making process is either lost or not maximized at all too often, we don't have a solid understanding of the questions being asked and how to apply the data correctly to the problem at hand.
Python is one of the world’s most popular programming languages, and there has never been greater demand for professionals with the ability to apply Python fundamentals to drive business solutions across industries.
Much of the world's data resides in databases. SQL (or Structured Query Language) is a powerful language which is used for communicating with and extracting data from databases. A working knowledge of databases and SQL is a must if you want to become a data scientist.
"A picture is worth a thousand words". We are all familiar with this expression. It especially applies when trying to explain the insight obtained from the analysis of increasingly large datasets. Data visualization plays an essential role in the representation of both small and large-scale data.
One of the key skills of a data scientist is the ability to tell a compelling story, visualizing data and findings in an approachable and stimulating way. Learning how to leverage a software tool to visualize data will also enable you to extract information, better understand the data, and make more effective decisions.
The Final capstone project course will give you a taste of what data scientists go through in real life when working with data.
You will learn about location data and different location data providers, such as Foursquare. You will learn how to make RESTful API calls to the Foursquare API to retrieve data about venues in different neighborhoods around the world. You will also learn how to be creative in situations where data are not readily available by scraping web data and parsing HTML code. You will utilize Python and its pandas library to manipulate data, which will help you refine your skills for exploring and analyzing data.
Finally, you will be required to use the Folium library to great maps of geospatial data and to communicate your results and findings.