What is This Book?

This book is originated from my Data Science course. It was in the lab sessions, where students practice different steps in the workflow of Data Science projects. Students enjoyed the detailed practices using different methods, algorithms, and techniques to solve analytical problems. To my surprise, we only find out later, that the student failed to grasp the real meaning of doing data science, which is NOT to provide an absolutely perfect working solution to a problem, rather, an experimental interpretation of data at hand. In other words, a data science project is normally aimed to provide an explanation of what the data is telling you. Even you are making a prediction model, there will never be a perfect model that produces 100 percent prediction accuracy. You are not using data you have to solve problems that data has not to provide any solution to you!

I did a short tutorial for my students. The tutorial was emphasizing on the process and workflow of doing a data science project. That short tutorial was extremely successful and welcomed by all students, particularly the students who are not from Computer Science, Software Engineering, Statistics, Applied Mathematics, etc. rather, from Information Science and Management Science. I figured out the student’s satisfaction comes from the practical skills and particularly the hands-on experience of doing a data science project rather than learning methods, algorithms, and parallel computation platforms without doing any.

So, I suppose this book is practical for students who have no background in computing and programming knowledge but interested in doing a Data Science project or moving to Data Science in the future.

In summary, this book is an introduction level book for novelty students who want to learn Data Science in a short period of time perhaps a few days or during their winter or summer holidays.