This unit answers an urgent call to harness the unprecedented amount of data now generated from every facet of our daily life by introducing data science as the discipline dealing with collecting, representing, manipulating and visualising data in contemporary society. Students taking the unit learn to write computer programs to extract, transform and integrate data from multiple heterogeneous sources, including traditional relational databases and web-based resources. Different data representation formats such as XML, JSON and HDF5, as well as storage options including SQL and NOSQL type of databases, are introduced and compared. Another core objective is the development of programming skills to enable effective and meaningful visualisation of the data. Students are given the opportunity to put the learned knowledge in data acquisition, data processing, data representation and exploratory visualisation into practice through projects that are highly relevant to real-world data analytics. The unit provides the fundamental knowledge, introduces the essential processes for exploratory data analysis and builds the specific critical programming skills required during the journey of growing a student into a capable data scientist.

Students are able to (1) write programs to systematically collect, process and integrate data of different types and from different sources.; (2) select appropriate data visualisation options; (3) demonstrate programming abilities to build solutions for exploratory data analysis using visualisation and clustering techniques; (4) critically assess the outcomes of a data analysis; and (5) communicate effectively with stakeholders.