About this course

In this course, you will learn to pose interesting questions and draw meaningful conclusions from data. It is an introductory statistics course, with a focus on data analysis. We will also cover the basic theory behind the methods that we use in the course. Much of the course will focus on analyzing datasets drawn from a number of different fields. We will discuss case studies using these datasets, and you will conduct your own analyses.

In this course you will learn to do data analysis using the Python programming language. Specifically, you will learn to use a few Python libraries that support data analysis, especially Pandas. You do not need to have prior experience with computer programming, or with Python. This is not a programming class, and we will only cover the programming topics that we need in order to accomplish our data analysis goals. You will gain some proficiency in Python, but this course will not give you a systematic and thorough introduction to Python or to computer science. Instead, the main goal of the course is to introduce you to the conceptual and practical aspects of rigorous data analysis.