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[Infographic] Data Science Learning Checklist

Use this handy checklist to guide your data science learning journey.
Jan 2023  · 4 min read

A career in data science is highly sought-after and lucrative. It encompasses a range of tasks such as studying and organizing data, applying machine learning techniques, and being aware of business objectives. To excel in this field, you should have a combination of abilities, like scrutinizing data, grasping business concepts, communication proficiencies, and more. To aid in your progress, use this list as a reference point in your learning journey.

Data Cleaning Checklist@1x.png

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Exploratory Data Analysis

Descriptive Statistics

  • Calculate metrics on measures of location like mean and median, measures of variation like range and standard deviation, and other characteristics of features
  • Calculate metrics like correlation to understand the relationships between feature

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Data Visualization

  • Create plots like bar plots, histograms and box plots to visualize single features.
  • Create plots like scatter plots, line plots and heat maps to visualize relationships between features.

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Data Management

Importing & Reading Data

  • Import data from common file formats like CSV and spreadsheets.
  • Import data by querying SQL databases.
  • Import data via web APIs.

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Data Wrangling

  • Perform common data manipulations such as sorting, subsetting, adding new features, and aggregating.
  • Join two datasets together via inner, left and other joins.
  • Pivot a rectangular dataset to convert rows to columns or columns to rows.

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Data Cleaning

  • Identify and fix issues with data constraints such as wrong data types, numbers out of range, or duplicate values.
  • Identify and fix issues with text and categorical data, such as invalid categories or incorrect formatting.
  • Identify and fix issues with data uniformity, such as incorrect units, incorrect date formats, and inconsistency between features.
  • Identify and fix issues with missing data values.

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Business Acumen

Business Goals

  • Make recommendations for analytic approaches based on business goals
  • Judge performance of analytic results against KPIs or other relevant business criteria

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Organizational Knowledge

  • Understand the impact of data science projects on your business.
  • Understand which teams or employees need to be involved in a data project, and in what capacity.

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Programming for Data Science

Computational Thinking

  • Use common programming constructs like flow control and iteration.
  • Understand functions and functional programming to write repeatable code for analysis.

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Production Coding

  • Make use of version control like git for managing code
  • Use error handling, assertions, and unit tests to ensure code quality
  • Write documentation to make your code understandable by others
  • Develop packages to make your code reusable

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Model Development

Model Design

  • Choose an appropriate model type (regression, classification, clustering, etc.) based on your dataset and the analysis goals

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Feature Engineering

  • Extract problem-relevant information from existing features, like getting the day of week from a datetime variable, or getting an "is working age" indicator from a date of birth.
  • Combine multiple features into new features, for example summing regional sales into total sales, or calculating profit as revenue minus costs.
  • Use external datasets to define new features, for example using a geographic API to get the city from a longitude and latitude, or using a computer vision API to determine if an image contains people.
  • Use imputation to estimate missing values.

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Model Fitting

  • Can generate training and testing splits from a dataset, including using cross-validation.
  • Uses hyperparameter tuning to optimize model performance.

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Model Validation

  • Can evaluate supervised learning model performance using metrics like accuracy, precision and recall.
  • Can evaluate unsupervised learning model performance using metrics like homogeneity, completeness, and silhouette coefficient.

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Statistical Experimentation

Sampling Methods

  • Understand statistical distributions like the normal, uniform and Poisson distributions
  • Choose appropriate sampling methods to answer your questions while avoiding bias.

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Hypothesis Testing

  • Understand null and alternative hypotheses
  • Know when and how to use hypothesis tests like the t-test, Chi-squared test, and Mann-Whitney U test
  • Interpret test statistics and p-values

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Data Communication

Data Storytelling

  • Create a narrative that describes your motivation, methods, results, and conclusions
  • Ensure your narrative is consistent with the findings of the data
  • Edit your stories to remove extraneous details

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Understand your Audience

  • Understand your audience's prior knowledge and interests
  • Tailor your message to resonate with the audience, even if they are non-technical

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