It's time to push forward and develop your Python chops even further. There are tons of fantastic functions in Python and its library ecosystem. However, as a data scientist, you'll constantly need to write your own functions to solve problems that are dictated by your data. You will learn the art of function writing in this first Python Data Science Toolbox course. You'll come out of this course being able to write your very own custom functions, complete with multiple parameters and multiple return values, along with default arguments and variable-length arguments. You'll gain insight into scoping in Python and be able to write lambda functions and handle errors in your function writing practice. And you'll wrap up each chapter by using your new skills to write functions that analyze Twitter DataFrames.

Learn the art of writing your own functions in Python, as well as key concepts like scoping and error handling.

Python Data Science Toolbox (Part 1)

After all of the hard work of acquiring data and getting them into a form you can work with, you ultimately want to make clear, succinct conclusions from them. This crucial last step of a data analysis pipeline hinges on the principles of statistical inference. In this course, you will start building the foundation you need to think statistically, speak the language of your data, and understand what your data is telling you. The foundations of statistical thinking took decades to build, but can be grasped much faster today with the help of computers. With the power of Python-based tools, you will rapidly get up-to-speed and begin thinking statistically by the end of this course.

Build the foundation you need to think statistically and to speak the language of your data.

Statistical Thinking in Python (Part 1)

As a data scientist, you will need to clean data, wrangle and munge it, visualize it, build predictive models, and interpret these models. Before you can do so, however, you will need to know how to get data into Python. In this course, you'll learn the many ways to import data into Python: from flat files such as .txt and .csv; from files native to other software such as Excel spreadsheets, Stata, SAS, and MATLAB files; and from relational databases such as SQLite and PostgreSQL.

Learn to import data into Python from various sources, such as Excel, SQL, SAS and right from the web.

You'll learn the many ways to read data into Python: from flat files such as CSVs to Excel spreadsheets and relational databases in SQLite & PostgreSQL.

Introduction to Importing Data in Python

Decision trees are supervised learning models used for problems involving classification and regression. Tree models present a high flexibility that comes at a price: on one hand, trees are able to capture complex non-linear relationships; on the other hand, they are prone to memorizing the noise present in a dataset. By aggregating the predictions of trees that are trained differently, ensemble methods take advantage of the flexibility of trees while reducing their tendency to memorize noise. Ensemble methods are used across a variety of fields and have a proven track record of winning many machine learning competitions.
In this course, you'll learn how to use Python to train decision trees and tree-based models with the user-friendly scikit-learn machine learning library. You'll understand the advantages and shortcomings of trees and demonstrate how ensembling can alleviate these shortcomings, all while practicing on real-world datasets. Finally, you'll also understand how to tune the most influential hyperparameters in order to get the most out of your models.

In this course, you'll learn how to use tree-based models and ensembles for regression and classification using scikit-learn. 

Machine Learning with Tree-Based Models in Python

Now that you have learned the foundations of pandas, this course will give you the chance to apply that knowledge by answering interesting questions about a real dataset! You will explore the Stanford Open Policing Project dataset and analyze the impact of gender on police behavior. During the course, you will gain more practice cleaning messy data, creating visualizations, combining and reshaping datasets, and manipulating time series data. Analyzing Police Activity with pandas will give you valuable experience analyzing a dataset from start to finish, preparing you for your data science career!

Explore the Stanford Open Policing Project dataset and analyze the impact of gender on police behavior using pandas.

Analyzing Police Activity with pandas

You’ve already used SQL to query data from databases. But did you know that there's a lot more you can do with databases? You can model different phenomena in your data, as well as the relationships between them. This gives your data structure and consistency, which results in better data quality. In this course, you'll experience this firsthand by working with a real-life dataset that was used to investigate questionable university affiliations. Column by column, table by table, you'll get to unlock and admire the full potential of databases. You'll learn how to create tables and specify their relationships, as well as how to enforce data integrity. You'll also discover other unique features of database systems, such as constraints.

Learn how to create one of the most efficient ways of storing data - relational databases! 

Learn how to create tables and specify their relationships in SQL, as well as how to enforce data integrity and other unique features of database systems.

Introduction to Relational Databases in SQL

Now that you’ve learned the basic tools of SQL you are ready to synthesize them into practical, real-world skills. In this course, you will work with a database of a fictional movie rental company. The size and complexity of this database will allow you to experience the challenges of working with databases firsthand. Throughout this course, you will use SQL to answer business-driven questions. You will learn new skills that will empower you to find the tables you need. You will then learn how to store and manage this data in tables and views that you create. Best of all you will also learn how to write code that not only clearly conveys your intent but is also legible.

Find tables, store and manage new tables and views, and write maintainable SQL code to answer business questions.

Data Science Courses

Data Science Tracks

Our Learning Experience

@datascientist800

Workspace Publications (0)

Completed Tracks (0)

Completed Courses (0)

Completed Projects (0)