Data Collection and Acquisition: Strategies and Platforms

0.5 Course Units

This course will give students a solid grasp of different data collection strategies and when and how they can be applied in practice. At the same time, important current ideas such as data confidentiality and ethical considerations will be addressed. The students will have designed and fielded a sample survey and designed and fielded an online experiment (A/B test). Student will collect data through web scraping activities and/or using an API. Students will summarize their collected data and subsequent inferences, culminating with an in-class presentation. The course is structured in two parts. The first part is a "Strategies" component that addresses different data collection strategies. It will discuss sample designs, experimentation, and observational studies. The second part of the course is about "Platforms" and goes into the practicalities of the implementation of the different strategies. Given the data science perspective of this course, this is focused on web enabled approaches. Familiarity with either R or Python is expected and specifically the R-Studio or Jupyter notebooks platforms. Courses such as Stat 7050 or Stat 7770 would meet this requirement. Statistics, through the level of multiple regression is required. This requirement may be fulfilled with MBA courses such as Stat 6130/6210, or by waiving MBA statistics. Mutually Exclusive: STAT 4100 0.5 Course Units