Data Science (DS)

Introduces students to data science as a profession, as currently practiced and continuing to develop. Presents various elements of the data science life cycle at an introductory level, culminating with a start-to-finish data analysis project. Includes guest lectures from data science practitioners and faculty. Explores real-world examples of ethical issues, bias, and privacy in data science. Survey careers in data science and familiarize students with elements of career development.

This course introduces the critical concepts and skills in statistical inference, machine learning, and computer programming, through hands-on analysis of real-world datasets from various fields.

This course introduces the critical mathematical foundation knowledge for data science. Specifically, this course covers the basic topics on linear algebra and discrete math that are most relevant to the data science major.

This course introduces the critical concepts and skills of ethics and privacy in data science, as well as hands-on implementation of important algorithms. It will cover important concepts of bias and privacy, and the computational strategies to ensure fairness and privacy in a variety of emerging data science applications. The course provided hands-on experience in collecting, analyzing, and modeling data for tackling ethical issues.

This course introduces mathematical tools from optimization, differential equations, and numerical analysis etc. that are relevant to the data science major.

This course is designed to educate the data science students in the typical project life-cycle stages required in the data science professions. Stages of a data science project from start to finish such as obtaining data, exploring data, determining what questions the data can answer, exploratory analysis, ethical impacts analysis and mitigation, hypothesis (re-)formulation, in-depth analysis, validation, and reporting, are presented.

In this project-oriented course, students will work in small groups to solve real-world data analysis problems and communicate their results. Innovation and clarity of the presentation will be key elements of evaluation. Students will have an option to do this as an independent data analytics internship with an industry partner.

In this capstone course, students will work in teams to explore a data-rich real-world issue from business, industry, government, or scientific research. Teams will identify a problem, then model, solve, and communicate their solution using data science techniques such as data mining, regression, machine learning, hypothesis testing, and data visualization. Emphasis will be placed on team building, planning, reflection and course correction, and reporting in written and presentation form. Ethics and privacy implications will be identified and explored, so that each team conducts the modeling and reporting process appropriately.