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Week 5 — Filling In

This week is primarily for practice and solidifying concepts. I'm also going to take a step back and give some more context to some of the things we're talking about.

This week's videos are also in a Panopto playlist.

Week 5 Quiz

The Week 5 quiz is about material through the end of Week 4. Nothing from this week will be on it, except that things here may clarify some of last week's material for you.

Assignment 1 Solution

I will post the Assignment 1 solution to Piazza (sorry, I'm not posting it to the entire Internet).

Glossary Updates

I have extensively updated the course glossary. Please post on Piazza if you have suggested additions!

Writing Functions

I've used Python functions in a few of my example notebooks. The function notebook talks more about them, how to write them, and how to use them.

Comparing Distributions

This video describes how to use Q-Q plots to compare data against a distribution.

Resources

T-tests

This video discusses the t-test in more detail, and the different kinds of t-tests that we can run. It also introduces degrees of freedom.

Python Errors

This video discusses common Python errors and how to read errors.

Python Libraries

Resources

One Sample Notebook

The One Sample notebook demonstrates how to compute a one-sample t-test, and draw a Q-Q plot to compare a distribution with normal.

Epistemology

In this video, I talk about how the quantitative data science methods we are learning fit into a broader picture of source of knowledge.

Learning More

Practice

There are a few things you can do to keep practing the material:

  • The HETREC data contains two data sets besides the movie data: Delicious bookmarks and Last.FM listening records. Download this data set and apply some of our exploratory techniques to it.
  • Download the SBA data from Week 4's activity and describe the distributions of more of the variables.
  • Apply the inference techniques from Week 4 to statistically test the differences you observed in Assignment 1.

More Examples

Some more examples from my own work (these are not all cleaned up to our checklist standards):

Tutorials

The indexing notebook is now up!

Assignment 2

Assignment 2 is due on September 27.