July 17, 2024

Allen B. Downey writes:

Elements of Data Science is an introduction to data science for people with no programming experience. My goal is to present a small, powerful subset of Python that allows you to do real work with data as quickly as possible.

Part 1 includes six chapters that introduce basic Python with a focus on working with data.

Part 2 presents exploratory data analysis using Pandas and empiricaldist — it includes a revised and updated version of the material from my popular DataCamp course, “Exploratory Data Analysis in Python.”

Part 3 takes a computational approach to statistical inference, introducing resampling method, bootstrapping, and randomization tests.

Part 4 is the first of two case studies. It uses data from the General Social Survey to explore changes in political beliefs and attitudes in the U.S. in the last 50 years. The data points on the cover are from one of the graphs in this section.

Part 5 is the second case study, which introduces classification algorithms and the metrics used to evaluate them — and discusses the challenges of algorithmic decision-making in the context of criminal justice.

This project started in 2019, when I collaborated with a group at Harvard to create a data science class for people with no programming experience. We discussed some of the design decisions that went into the course and the book in this article.

Read Elements of Data Science in the form of Jupyter notebooks.