Introduction to Programming and Data Science

About this course:

This course introduces Python programming as a practical tool for data science, emphasizing its application to real-world social data analysis. Through a structured curriculum, professionals with little or no prior experience in programming will learn essential techniques for reading, manipulating, and analyzing data. These skills are taught using Pandas, the world’s most popular programming language.  The course uses actionable datasets such as the American Community Survey, housing and transportation data from California’s open data portal, and the Armed Conflict, Locations, and Event Data.   The course emphasizes loading and describing data with Pandas, the leading Python tool for cleaning, transformation, and merging datasets. Participants will learn how to perform data visualization, descriptive statistics, basic inferential analysis, textual, and spatial data analysis. Interactive lectures, live coding sessions, and collaborative lab exercises facilitate a hands-on learning experience.   This course empowers midcareer professionals with the technical and problem-solving skills necessary to drive data-informed decisions and foster innovative problem solving.