In this course, students will learn to appreciate the importance of successful data visualizations and intelligible stories in communicating insights. Using real-world datasets, learners will gain the necessary skills to fashion effective vizzes that …
In this course, students learn data science fundamentals that are more in tune with their applications to business; essentially, how the field is applied in the real-world. Students are provided with a comprehensive overview of data science and …
Complex Systems are systems composed of heterogeneous agents that are highly interacting and whose interactions result to emergent behavior, e.g. societies, economies, markets, cities, and biological systems like the immune system and the brain, to …
This course introduces participants to the latest trends in analytics in the era of big data, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things. The course explores various data-driven approaches, frameworks, and models used by different industries …
The visualization in “data visualization” does not actually refer to how visually appealing your figure or chart is, but in how well it enables others to visualize the data you are trying to communicate. At the end of the day, we are communicators speaking through the language of data, and most of the time, our best vehicle for our chosen language is in the visualizations that we produce.
The most memorable and most influential people in one’s life are the good storytellers. What we normally consider as the most memorable teachers in our younger years were the ones who connected with you and told the best stories. Such is the same takeaway from this course as I begin my journey in data science. This course will hopefully remind me that at the end of all the technical, mathematical, analytical work that one will do, and all the lines of code that will be written, you have to tell a good story. Good stories will inspire you. Good stories will call people to action. The stories told by a person help perpetuate the influence of that person long beyond the time the story is told.
'Soft skills' like visualization and storytelling are oftentimes not being given the same attention as the technical skills; but, if you think about it, your visualization and how you present your findings in the language of your stakeholders **is the only part of your analysis that your audience ever sees**. To aspiring data scientists and even professionals, may we all not suffer from the pain of our analysis being neglected just because we failed to communicate it well.
That is the main idea of the class. Facts are concrete and undeniable but it is faster to grasp the concept of the data used if it is dressed up with graphs and other visualizations. I learned some tricks into making those pretty pictures from the class. More importantly, the course makes you realize that it isn’t enough to just have something to look at. What’s more important is having a flow that guides the audience on a path on whatto look at and count as important. In the class, those tricks and tips were introduced and the help it gives shouldn’t be underestimated.
Data visualization is always about communicating information. Most of us fall into the trap of visualizing for the sake of visualizing to the point that the entire point of the analysis is lost. For example, plain, bold text telling you an important statistic is way more effective than a fancy pie graph with more than seven partitions simply because it communicates the information better. Likewise, a visualization of a small slice of the data is better than visualizing everything if you’re only really concerned with the small portion.
Our exercises with applying traditional statistical methods on tricky data sets really stuck with me. If I were alone and did not know any better, I would have committed the exact mistakes that the course has taught me to avoid. Before this course, all I had was a hammer and everything looked like a nail. All in all, I would sum up this course as a tool kit. It has given me more than enough to work with such that now when I am exploring new data, I can be present them more confidently.