Data Science

Fab Futures: Data Science

Week 1

Tuesday: Introduction

Topics

• Fab Futures
• Fab Labs
• Academany
• Vocational skills
• Illiberal arts

Examples

• Climate change
• Energy literacy

Taxonomy

• Interpolation, extrapolation
• Parametric, non-parametric
• Supervised, unsupervised
• Offline, online
• Generative

Resources

• Class interactive notebooks
• The Nature of Mathematical Modeling
• Numerical Recipes

Assignment

Select a data set to analyze

Thursday: Tools Survey

Programming

• Python
• Jupyter
• Colab

Math

• NumPy
• Jax
• PyTorch

Visualization

• Matplotlib
• Plotly
• D3

Data

• Flat files
• SQL

Assignment

Plot your data set

Week 2

Tuesday: Fitting

Functions

• Linear
• Scalar
• Matrix
• Nonlinear
• Polynomial

Methods

• Linear least squares
• Singular Value Decomposition (SVD)
• Nonlinear least squares
• Levenberg–Marquardt

Assignment

Fit a function to your data

Thursday: Neural Networks

Topics

• Breadth vs depth
• Back propagation
• Early stopping
• Autoencoders

Assignment

Fit a neural network to your data

Week 3

Tuesday: Probability

Errors

• Model estimation
• Model mismatch

Probability Distributions

• Unconditional
• Conditional

Statistics

• Variance
• Covariance
• Correlation

Common Distributions

• Gaussian
• Long tail
• Multi-modal

Frequentist vs Bayesian

• Priors
• Regularization

Assignment

Investigate the probability distribution of your data

Thursday: Inference

Clustering

• k-means
• Voronoi tessellation
• Hard and soft boundaries

Density Estimation

• Mixture models
• Cluster-weighted modeling

Assignment

Fit a probability distribution to your data

Week 4

Tuesday: Transforms

Topics

• Fast Fourier Transform (FFT)
• Wavelets
• Principal Components Analysis (PCA)

Assignment

Document your analysis of your data

Thursday: Site Presentations and Discussion

Activity

• Present your analysis
• Discuss findings with peers