DATA 301: Introduction to Data Science
Fall 2025

Instructor: Alexander Dekhtyar, dekhtyar@calpoly.edu, 14-212

Office Hours:
When
Who Where
Monday 10:10am - 11:00am Alex 14-212
Wednesday 9:10pm - 11:00pm Alex 14-212
Friday 12:10pm - 1:00pm Alex 14-212

Additional appoinments: send email.

Course Materials

Syllabus Postscript PDF
Dennis Sun's Texbook Github
Jupyter Labs Server https://dev2.csc.calpoly.edu:5000/
Gradescope DATA 301 Gradescope

Project

Part 1: Project Proposal Due: November 6 PDF
Project Ideas and Examples PDF
Part 2: Project Execution Plan Due: November 18 PDF GoogleDoc
Part 3: Project Implementation and Report Due: December 11 PDF

Takehome Labs

Lab 1 Due: October 3, 7:00pm Colab .ipynb Gradescope
Lab 2 Due: October 10, 7:00pm Colab .ipynb Gradescope
Lab 3 Due: October 24, 7:00pm Colab .ipynb Gradescope
Lab 4 Due: November 14 Colab .ipynb Gradescope
Lab 5 Due: November 21 Colab .ipynb Gradescope
Lab 6 Due: December 3 Colab .ipynb Gradescope

Day by Day

DoW Date Lecture Lecture Slides Lecture Notebook Discussion Discussion Notebook Other Materials
Google Colab Course Web Page Google Colab Course Web Page
Thursday September 18 Introduction, Syllabus, What is Data Science? PDF LN01: Colab LN01: .ipynb Python Notebooks and Google Colab DS01: Colab DS01: .ipynb
Tuesday September 23 Data Frames: Work with Tabular Data in Python PDF LN02: Colab LN02: .ipynb Opearations on Data Frames DS02: Colab DS02: .ipynb Alcohol Effects on Study dataset (Kaggle)
Thursday September 25 Operations with Data Frames: Complex Queries, Joins PDF LN03: Colab LN03: .ipynb Complex queries DS03: Colab DS03: .ipynb
Tuesday September 30 Operations with Data Frames: Joins and Union PDF LN04: Colab LN04: .ipynb
Thursday October 2 Work with Categorical Variables PDF LN05: Colab LN05: .ipynb COVID Fatalities DS04: Colab DS04: .ipynb
Tuesday October 7 Work with Numeric Variables PDF LN06: Colab LN06: .ipynb College Scorecard DS05: Colab DS05: .ipynb
Thursday October 9 Work with Categorical Variables (Part 2) PDF LN07-1: Colab
LN07-2: Colab 		LN07-1: .ipynb
LN07-2: .ipynb
Tuesday October 14 Relationships between Numeric Variables PDF LN08: Colab LN08: .ipynb
Thursday October 16 Quiz #2 Intro to Matplotlib DS06: Colab DS06: .ipynb
Tuesday October 21 Distance and Similarity Metrics PDF LN09: Colab LN09: .ipynb Distances in Matplotlib DS07: Colab DS07: .ipynb
Thursday October 23 Text Vectorization Part 1
Categorical Variable Encoding/Column Transformers		 PDF
PDF		 LN10: Colab
LN11: Colab		 LN10: .ipynb
LN11: .ipynb
Tuesday October 28 Term Frequency - Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) PDF LN12: Colab LN12: .ipynb Who wrote the Gospels? DS08: Colab DS08: .ipynb
Thursday October 30 Predictive Modeling, Supervised Learning, Regression PDF LN13: Colab
LN13: .ipynb Predictive Modeling DS09: Colab DS09: .ipynb
Tuesday November 4 Quiz #3
Thursday November 6 Linear Regression PDF LN14: Colab
LN14: .ipynb Predicting House Prices DS10: Colab DS10: .ipynb
Tuesday November 11 No Classs
Thursday November 13 Model Evaluation
Model Selection 		PDF
PDF 		LN15: Colab
LN16: Colab 		LN15: .ipynb
LN16: .ipynb 		Evaluating House Price Predictions
Grid Search 		DS11: Colab
DS12: Colab 		DS11: .ipynb
DS12: .ipynb
Tuesday November 18 Classification, K-Nearest Neighbors PDF LN17: Colab LN17: .ipynb Handwritten Digit Classification DS13: Colab DS13: .ipynb
Thursday November 20 Classification: Logistic Regression, SVMs PDF LN18: Colab
LN18: .ipynb Evaluation of Classifiers DS14: Colab DS18: .ipynb
Tuesday December 2 Clustering, KMeans Clustering PDF LN19: Colab LN19: .ipynb Clustering (as data compression) DS15: Colab DS15: .ipynb
Thursday December 4 Clustering Evaluation

Course Review		 PDF

PDF 		LN20: Colab
LN21: Colab
LN20: .ipynb
LN21: .ipynb

September 18, 2025, dekhtyar at csc.calpoly.edu