INFO 3401
Information Exploration
INFO 3401 “Information Exploration” is a semester-length, lecture-based undergraduate course. The volume, velocity, variety, and variability of data challenges our ability to collect, analyze, interpret, and act. This course will develop students’ skills and sensibilities for conducting exploratory data analysis across seven kinds of data. Students will learn to collect, analyze, visualize, evaluate, and communicate data to motivate new questions, make predictions, and work towards solutions. This course will call upon the quantitative and computational skills students have developed in previous courses and will increase their confidence and autonomy as data analysts and scientists who can deliver insights from diverse kinds of data.
Learning objectives
- Improve students’ confidence analyzing diverse kinds of data
- Develop students’ ability to match questions to data to solutions
- Understand professional data science tools and methods
- Think critically about the opportunities and limitations of data
Course outline
| Module | Week | Type | Skills |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Introductions | ||
| Tabular | 2 | Fundamentals | Single tables, pandas |
| 3 | Applications | Population data | |
| Relational | 4 | Fundamentals | Multiple tables, sqlite |
| 5 | Applications | Sports data | |
| Temporal | 6 | Fundamentals | Time series, prophet |
| 7 | Applications | Economic data | |
| Spatial | 8 | Fundamentals | Mapping, geopandas |
| 9 | Applications | Political data | |
| Dyadic | 10 | Fundamentals | Networks, networkx |
| 11 | Applications | social network data | |
| Structured | 12 | Fundamentals | JSON \& XML, beautifulsoup |
| 13 | Applications | API data | |
| 14 | Fall Break | ||
| Unstructured | 15 | Fundamentals | Text, nltk |
| 16 | Applications | Text data |