The Art of Data Science

The ever increasing computational capacity has enabled us to acquire, process and analyse larger data-sets and information. We increasingly want to take a data-driven lens to solve business problems. But business problems are inherently ‘wicked in nature’ - with multiple stakeholder, different problem definition, different solutions interdependence, constraints, amplifying loops etc. There is no one trick to solve them. What is required is learning a structured approach to problem solving that can be applied to large set of these problems. One possible way is to use a Hypotheses Driven Approach - problems definition, scoping, issue identification and hypothesis generation - as a starting point for this. In this workshop, you will learn how to apply this hypotheses driven approach through seven pragmatic steps - Frame, Acquire, Refine, Transform, Explore, Model, and Insight - to any business problem. The focus will be to learn the principles through an applied case study and by actually coding in R or Python to solve this.

Objective

• Imbibe the underlying principles of data analytics and learn how to use the data science pipeline
• Develop proficiency in using R or python data stack and libraries like ggplot, dplyr, stats (for R) and pandas, scikit-learn (for python)
• Learn how to employ statistical and machine learning algorithms to solve real life problems

Approach

• Taught by real life practicioners
• Tested and practical curriculum with real data sets
• Interactive and live coding sessions

Curriculum

1. INTRO

“I think, therefore I am”

• What is data science?
• What type of questions can be answered?
• Frame/Acquire/Refine/Explore/Model/Insight/Build/Deploy framework

2. FRAME

“Framing the problem is often far more essential than its solution”

• How to frame a data science problem?
• Learn the hypothesis-driven approach?
• How do you start - question driven, dataset driven or both?

3. ACQUIRE

“Data is the new oil”

• Sources of Data
  • Download from an internal system
  • Obtained from client or other 3rd party
  • Extracted from a web-based API
  • Scraped from a website / pdfs
  • Gathered manually and recorded
• Acquire data from a csv file or a database
• Acquire data from a website (scrapint) or 3rd part client (e.g. twitter)

4. REFINE

“Data is messy”

• Concept of Tidy Data - Why is it important?
  • Missing e.g. Check for missing or incomplete data
  • Quality e.g. Check for duplicates, accuracy, unusual data
  • Remove e.g. remove redundant data
  • Parse e.g. extract year from date
  • Derive e.g. gender from title

5. TRANSFORM

“What is measured may not help answer what is needed “

• Convert e.g. free text to coded value
• Merge e.g. first and surname for full name
• Calculate e.g. percentages, proportion
• Aggregate e.g. rollup by year, cluster by area
• Filter e.g. exclude based on location
• Sample e.g. extract a representative data
• Summary e.g. show summary stats like mean
• Basic statistics: variance, standard deviation, co-variance, correlation

4. EXPLORE

“I don’t know, what I don’t know”

• Why do visual exploration?
• Understand Data Structure & Types
• Grammar of Graphics and Basics of visualisation
• Explore single & dual variable graphs
• Explore multi-dimensional variable graphs
• Creating new features from the data

6. MODEL

“All models are wrong, Some of them are useful”

• Introduction to Machine Learning
• The power and limits of models
• Tradeoff between Prediction Accuracy and Model Interpretability
• Bias-Variance tradeoff & Overfitting
• Prediction Problem - Regression & Classification
• Model Family - Linear & Tress

7. INSIGHT

“The goal is to turn data into insight”

• Assessing Model Accuracy
  • For Regression problems: RMSE
  • For classification problems: Accuracy, AUC/ROC
• Selecting a Model: Cross Validation
• Why do we need to communicate insight?
• Types of communication - Exploration vs. Explanation
• Explanation: Telling a story with data
• Exploration: Building an interface for people to find stories

Target Audicence

• Professionals interested in learning data science
• Programmers interested in building data driven products
• Journalist, scientist, researchers interested in telling data stories
• Business Intelligence analysts and consultants

The workshop is ideal for anyone who wants to learn how to use open source software - R or Python stack for statistical analysis and visualization. If you are not using R or Python for statistical analysis, then existing familiarity with data analysis in some other tool would help. There is no pre-requisite requirement to be familiar with the R or Python libraries mentioned above.

Software Requirements

For doing the exercise during the workshop, we would be using R and R IDE - R Studio or Anaconda Distribution for Python. Please install the same in your machine prior to the workshop session. For attendees more curious, we will be using Rmarkdown or Jupyter Notebook as our IDE. Some of the main libraries we will using in the session are:

• For R: dplyr, tidyr, ggplot, ggmap, plotly, rmarkdown, purr, prophet and forcats
• For python: numpy, plotnine, seaborn, matplotlib, prophet and scikit-learn.

The working repo for this workshop is at https://github.com/amitkaps/art-data-science

Facilitators’ Profile

Amit Kapoor teaches the craft of telling visual stories with data. He conducts workshops and trainings on Data Science in Python and R, as well as on Data Visualisation topics. His background is in strategy consulting having worked with AT Kearney in India, then with Booz & Company in Europe and more recently for startups in Bangalore. He did his B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering from IIT, Delhi and PGDM (MBA) from IIM, Ahmedabad. You can find more about him at http://amitkaps.com/ and tweet him at @amitkaps.

Bargava Subramanian is a practicing Data Scientist. He has 14 years of experience delivering business analytics solutions to Investment Banks, Entertainment Studios and High-Tech companies. He has given talks and conducted workshops on Data Science, Machine Learning, Deep Learning and Optimization in Python and R. He has a Masters in Statistics from University of Maryland, College Park, USA. He is an ardent NBA fan. You can find more about him at http://bargava.com/ and tweet to him at @bargava.