Getting Started with Data Science and Analysis

I’ve been an instructor for Software-Carpentry (SWC) over a year now. It’s been a facinating experience and I’m proud to be a part of an open source movement promoting best practices. Typically when looking to start learing data science/analysis the first things people look up is something along the lines of: “learn python”, “free online r course”, “data science python”, “r jobs”, etc. Or scan through the coursera offerings. I’m a bit biased, but I think the SWC material is one of the best ways to just get familiar with the basics.

Open Source A Python Project I

I started my first open source project towards the end of summer 2014 I began working at the Social Decision Analytics Laboratory at the Virginia Informatics Institutee. The project involves creating a simulation environment where we can observe how an idea or belief spreads within a social network. The initial thought was to look for and extend an agent-based model package in Python. I did manage to find the pyabm package by Alex Zvoleff, but for simplicity’s sake I wrote my own package instead of extending his existing code base.