The Data Science and Predictive Analytics (DSPA) course (offered as a massive open online course, MOOC, as well as a traditional University of Michigan class) aims to build computational abilities, inferential thinking, and practical skills for tackling core data scientific challenges. It explores foundational concepts in data management, processing, statistical computing, and dynamic visualization using modern programming tools and agile web-services. Concepts, ideas, and protocols are illustrated through examples of real observational, simulated and research-derived datasets. Some prior quantitative experience in programming, calculus, statistics, mathematical models, or linear algebra will be necessary.

This open graduate course will provide a general overview of the principles, concepts, techniques, tools and services for managing, harmonizing, aggregating, preprocessing, modeling, analyzing and interpreting large, multi-source, incomplete, incongruent, and heterogeneous data (Big Data). The focus will be to expose students to common challenges related to handling Big Data and present the enormous opportunities and power associated with our ability to interrogate such complex datasets, extract useful information, derive knowledge, and provide actionable forecasting. Biomedical, healthcare, and social datasets will provide context for addressing specific driving challenges. Students will learn about modern data analytic techniques and develop skills for importing and exporting, cleaning and fusing, modeling and visualizing, analyzing and synthesizing complex datasets. The collaborative design, implementation, sharing and community validation of high-throughput analytic workflows will be emphasized throughout the course.