Data analysis is an essential part of many university courses and research projects. Computer systems have become indispensable for many data analysis tasks. Students and researchers can use scripting languages to perform many data analysis tasks more easily than with traditional programming languages. This course is of interest to people who need to readily perform data analysis. Scripting languages have been adopted by many research communities to aid in their research.

Prerequisites:  COMP 1510 or the former COMP 1700 or  COMP 1000 or  COMP 1001 (or equivalent)

Availability: This course is occasionally offered, but will not be available every academic year.

Course Objectives

This course will provide practical examples of using a scripting language to perform data analysis and data visualization. Common tasks of storing, searching, curve fitting, statistical analysis, plotting and data computation for data sets will be covered. Possible scripting languages include Perl, Python, and Ruby.

Representative Workload

• Assignments 30%
• Tests 30%
• Final Exam 50%

Representative Course Outline

• Control statements and expressions of the scripting language
• Subroutines and modules
• String processing
• Managing data files and sets
• Processing collections of data with lists and dictionaries
• Graphing (plotting) and data visualization
• Statistical data analysis
• Numeric computations with packages
• Finding and using application specific packages (such as: astronomy, physics, chemistry)

Page last updated May 24th 2021