Intro to Data Science
What is Data Science?
- Data science is an emerging field that combines important concepts from statistics, computer science, and substantive areas of focus.
Drew Conway’s Venn diagram of data science
- Data science is the science of extracting meaning and information from data to change some outcome
Data Science in Public Policy…?
Making effective policies requires data and data evaluation
- This is evidence-based policymaking
Regulation will likely require knowledge of data science tools and methods
Data Science in Public Policy…?
Source: Alex Englet/The University of Chicago
Data Science Questions?
- Easier questions:
- What is spending on healthcare like in the United States?
- How have voting patterns for each party changed in recent years?
- Harder questions:
- How do seat belt laws affect traffic fatalities? How can we reduce fatalities?
- Do job training programs reduce unemployment?
Data Science is a Process
Source: Doing Data Science Chapter 2
The Data Scientist’s Activity in the DS Process
Source: Doing Data Science Chapter 2
The Data Scientist’s Toolbox
Data Processing and Cleaning
- R, Python, SQL
Exploratory Data Analysis
- R, Python
Data Analysis
- Statistical Models, Machine Learning Algorithms
The R Project
- R is a programming language created by statisticians
- Specifically designed for data analysis/statistics and data visualization
- It’s free! Download it here: https://www.r-project.org
Python
Python is a programming language created by computer scientists
It is a general purpose language that can also be used for data analysis
It’s free! Download it here: https://www.python.org
SQL
SQL is a language for managing data bases
How would you deal with 20 terabytes of data that gets updated every hour?
- Yeah, that’s why you need SQL
It has different dialectics, or flavors (MySQL, Oracle, Postgres
It’s free! Download one dialect (MySQL) here: https://mysql-com.en.softonic.com/download
Integrated Development Environments (IDEs)
Let’s say you need to write a 20 page report. How will you write it?
TextEdit…
or MS Word?
Like MS Word, IDEs offer better tools to help you write code!
- → RStudio
- → PyCharm, Jupyter, RStudio
- SQL → MySQL Workbench, Oracle SQL Developer, RStudio
Workshop Overview
In this workshop series, we’ll take on an example project and walk through the data science process of:
Data cleaning
Exploratory analysis
Modeling
Reporting Results
What Data Science Tools are We Going to Use?
- R, Python, and RStudio