Merage School of Business MSBA Python Workshop, July 2022

Overview

MSBA Introduction to Python

This workshop is a joint collaboration between the Southern California R Users Group (SoCal RUG) and the UCI Paul Merage School of Business, Masters of Science in Business Analytics (MSBA)

In this workshop, a basic introduction to Python will be presented covering fundamentals of Python programming and practical data science skills using the pandas Python library.

Dates

• 2022-07-28 5 PM to 8 PM, Pacific Time
• 2022-07-29 1 PM to 4 PM, Pacific Time

Location

Zoom

Meeting ID: 946 6181 1499

Passcode: 398566

Prerequisites

• Sign up for a free RStudio Cloud account.

Course Logistics

• 3 hours each day, 2 days total
• Divide into 40 min sessions
  • 15 min instruction
  • 15 min practice in breakout rooms
  • Teaching assistants will be assigned to breakout rooms
  • 10 min review & questions
• 4 sessions per day (160 min for sessions + 10 min break + 10 min wrap-up)
  • Eight sessions total for both days
• RStudio Cloud Project. This is where you will do your coding.

Schedule

The two-day workshop will be presented as 4 sessions each day, where each session is roughly divided into 15 minutes of instruction, 15 minutes of practice and exercises, and 10 minutes of review (~40 min per session).

Thursday July 28: Python Fundamentals

The focus will be on Python as a language, drawing from the Python docs.

Instructor: Bryan Smith, Ph.D., Data Scientist at Google.

• Session 1: Using JupyterLab Notebooks
  • What is a notebook, why are they useful?
  • JupyterLab interface
  • Working with cells (creating, executing, cell types, etc)
  • Tips and best practices
• Session 2: Review of Python Fundamentals
  • Importance of spacing
  • Expressions and variables
  • Math operations
  • Data types (numbers, strings, boolean)
  • Lists
• Session 3: Control Flows
  • Conditional statements
  • Loops
• Session 4: Functions
  • What are they and why are they important
  • Function syntax
  • How to write your own functions
  • Tips and best practices

Friday July 29: Applied Data Science Fundamentals with pandas

The focus will be on Pandas as the entry into data science specific tasks, drawing from the getting started tutorials.

• Session 5: Introduction to pandas
  • Why tabular data tables are useful for data science (compare to Excel)
  • Series and DataFrames
  • How to create Series and DataFrames
  • How to read Series and DataFrames from files
• Session 6: Subsetting DataFrames
  • Selecting columns
  • Filtering rows
  • The various ways of indexing data frames (by labels, slices, conditional expressions), loc and iloc
• Session 7: Reshaping and Merging DataFrames
  • Wide vs. long formats and converting between the two: pivot and melt
  • Grouped summaries, groupby
  • Concatenating tables by column and row: concat
  • Joining data tables: merge
• Session 8: Data Visualization with pandas
  • Basic plotting from pandas: plot, scatter, box, hist, etc
  • Examples of more complex plots, coloring and grouping by variables
  • Tuning plot parameters (sizes, colors, layouts)
  • Saving plots (e.g. to use in presentations, etc)