The levels of data science class

Jeff Leek
2017-03-16

In a recent post, Nathan Yau points to a comment by Jake Porway about data science hackathons. They both say that for data science/visualization projects to be successful you have to start with an important question, not with a pile of data. This is the problem forward not solution backward approach to data science and big data. This is the approach also advocated in the really nice piece on teaching data science by Stephanie and Rafa

I have adopted a similar approach in the data science class here at Hopkins, largely inspired by Dan Meyer’s patient problem solving for middle school math class. So instead of giving students a full problem description I give them project suggestions like:

Each of these projects shares the characteristic that there is an interesting question - but the data may or may not be available. If it is available it may or may not have to be processed/cleaned/organized. Moreover, with the data in hand you may need to think about how it was collected or go out and collect some more data. This kind of problem is inspired by this quote from Dan’s talk - he was talking about math but it could easily have been data science:

Ask yourselves, what problem have you solved, ever, that was worth solving, where you knew knew all of the given information in advance? Where you didn’t have a surplus of information and have to filter it out, or you didn’t have insufficient information and have to go find some?

I realize though that this is advanced data science. So I was thinking about the levels of data science course and how you would build up a curriculum. I came up with the following courses/levels and would be interested in what others thought.

I think that a lot of the thought right now in biostatistics has been on level 3 and 4 courses. These are courses where we have students work with real data sets and learn about tools. To be self-sufficient as a data scientist it is clear you need to be able to work with real world data. But what Jake/Nathan are referring to is level 5 or level 6 - cases where you have a question but the data needs a ton of work and may not even be good enough without collecting new information. Jake and Nathan have perfectly identified the ability to translate murkey questions into data answers as the most valuable data skill. If I had to predict the future of data courses I would see them trending in that direction.