Intro to Data Analytics

Data analytics, the process of analyzing, revealing, interpreting, and visualizing information concealed inside big data, is revolutionizing daily life, as used by companies such as Amazon, Google and Facebook, for the diagnosis of medical conditions or the way medical claims are handled, for investment strategies and real estate pricing, and in academia, with the analysis of historical texts, understanding the deliberations of the Supreme Court or the European Commission, or processing large amounts of genomics data. In this class, students will be introduced to techniques to acquire data from the web, manipulate and pre-process data into manageable forms, perform analyses from a description and predictive standpoint, and learn the basics of visualizing the results, all with a focus on story telling through data, enhancing data literacy.