Requirements
This course and its subject matter are technical in nature. It is recommended that you have a
basic understanding of mathematics and statistics.
• Basic computer literacy (using a web browser, operating an email
account, downloading files, etc.).
• A current email account.
Basic • Access to a computer, the internet, and PDF reader software.
1 requirements
• Access to the Google office productivity apps (Docs, Sheets,
Slides – freely accessible to anyone with a Google account).
• Google Chrome to access the learning management system,
though any popular browser should suffice.
• OS: Windows 10 recommended (Windows 7 minimum), in order
to use Power BI; MacOS running Parallels for Windows will also
suffice.
Technical
2 requirements • Processor: Minimum i3, with a minimum clock speed of 2 GHz.
• RAM: Minimum 4 GB.
• Internet: A 10 Mbps line speed and 20 GB of data per month.
Please note that Google, Vimeo, and YouTube may be used in our
course delivery, and if these services are blocked in your jurisdiction
Additional or on your device, you may have difficulty accessing course content.
3 requirements
Please check with us before registering for this course if you have any
concerns about access restrictions affecting your experience with our
learning management system.
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Curriculum overview
This course will provide students with the knowledge, skills, and experience to get a job as a data scientist,
which requires a mix of programming and statistical understanding. The course will teach students to
gather data, visualise data, apply statistical analysis to answer questions, and make their insights and
information as actionable as possible. We cover the fundamentals of the data scientist’s toolkit as well as
a broad set of machine learning algorithms.
Duration: 11 months
Pre-requisite skills: Basic analytical background
Course difficulty: Advanced
Tools learned: Google Sheets, Python, Jupyter Notebooks, MySQL, Power BI
Phase Module Duration Recommended time
(Weeks) (Hours)
Explore101 1 15
Preparing data 2 70
Fundamentals
SQL 5 175
Data visualisation
4 140
and storytelling
Python 8 280
Regression 5 175
Natural language
Machine learning processing and 5 175
classification
Unsupervised
5 175
learning
Cloud practitioner AWS foundations 5 175
Consolidation Integrated exams 2 70
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ExploreAI Academy | explore-datascience.net
Module 1
Explore101
What is covered in this module:
Orientation
• Setting up your learning environment
• ExploreAI teaching philosophy and educational support framework
• Troubleshooting at ExploreAI Academy
Introduction to data and data analytics
• What is data and how it is used to make data-driven decisions
• An introduction to modern data practices and practitioners
• Approaches to data analysis
Problem-solving
• Mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive statements and
decisions
• Design thinking and the scientific method
• Introduction to solution-oriented communication
Programmatic thinking
• How to use algorithms and operators
• Flowcharts, pseudocode, and conditional statements
• Converting logic between statements, logic trees, pseudocode,
and flowcharts
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Module 2
Preparing data
What is covered in this module:
Introduction to spreadsheets
• Working with spreadsheets
• Data types and formatting
• Introduction to visualisation
Data manipulation
• Cleaning and analysing spreadsheet data
• Working with various data types
• Finding and fixing data anomalies
Introduction to statistics
• Summarising data using descriptive statistics
• Measures of central tendency and spread
• Samples and distributions
Introduction to data modelling
• Basic spreadsheet functions and conditionals
• Identifying patterns and the line of best fit
• Testing assumptions and model accuracy
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ExploreAI Academy | explore-datascience.net
Module 3
SQL
What is covered in this module:
Introduction to SQL
• Working with databases
• Basic SQL data types and calculations
• Aggregating, sorting, and grouping data
Relational database design
• SQL schemas and entity relationships
• Table normalisation, primary and foreign keys
• Common table expressions and views
SQL in practice
• Set theory and SQL joins
• Nested and subqueries
• Improving query performance
Data manipulation
• Cleaning and analysing data
• Working with numeric, time, and string data types
• Data transformations and anomalies
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Module 4
Data visualisation and
storytelling
What is covered in this module:
Data in Power BI
• Loading and linking datasets in Power BI
• Cleaning data and creating calculated columns and measures
using DAX
• Reports, data, and relationship views
Visuals in Power BI
• Numeric visuals – cards, tables
• Graphic visuals – line chart, bar chart, pie chart, column chart,
treemap
• Using slicers and custom visuals
Dashboards
• Planning, designing, and prototyping
• Working with various charts
• Working with filters
Visual storytelling
• Telling a story with visuals
• When to use which visuals
• Presentation best-practice
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ExploreAI Academy | explore-datascience.net
Module 5
Python
What is covered in this module:
Python programming basics
• Working in a Notebook environment
• Pseudo code and debugging concepts
• Working with primitive data types – variables, strings, integers,
floating points, booleans
Functions and control flow
• Creating and working with functions
• Conditional statements
• For loops and while loops
Data structures
• Lists, tuples, sets, and dictionaries
• Working with DataFrames
• Plots and graphs
Exploratory data analysis
• Statistical measures, probabilities, and hypotheses
• Algorithms and algorithmic complexity
• Advanced interactive visual analysis
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Module 6
Regression
What is covered in this module:
Steps to build a model
• Statistical learning, univariate and multivariate analysis
• Training models, making predictions, testing accuracy
• Variable significance and selection
Preparing data for modelling
• Defining or engineering features and labels
• Scaling, standardisation, and regularisation techniques
• Splitting data for training, testing, and validation
Algorithms for regression models
• K-nearest neighbours
• Decision trees and random forests
• Support vector machines
Model tuning
• Model performance metrics
• Bias and variance
• Hyperparameter tuning
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Module 7
Natural language processing
and classification
What is covered in this module:
An overview of natural language processing
• Removing punctuation and symbols
• Stopwords and regular expressions
• Tokenizing text
Analysing text
• Lemmatisation of words
• Bag of words
• Sentiment analysis
Basic classification
• Logistic regression and binary classification models
• Testing model output: confusion matrix, classification report
• Feature engineering and selection
Advanced classification
• Hyperparameters and model validation
• Dealing with imbalanced data and multi-class classification
• Neural networks and image classification
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Module 8
Unsupervised learning
What is covered in this module:
Dimensionality reduction
• Principal component analysis
• Multidimensional scaling
• Interpreting nonlinear transformations and embeddings
Hard and hierarchical clustering
• What is clustering?
• K-means clustering
• Hierarchical clustering
Soft clustering
• Gaussian mixture models
• Linear discriminant analysis and text clustering
• Labelling data using cluster output
Recommender systems
• Measures of product similarity
• Content and collaborative-based filtering
• Evaluating a recommender system
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ExploreAI Academy | explore-datascience.net
Module 9
AWS foundations
What is covered in this module:
Cloud computing basics
• Introduction to cloud computing concepts
• Pros and cons of cloud computing
• Popular cloud service providers
Introduction to Amazon Web Services
• Overview of AWS services
• Networking and content delivery
• Economics and billing
Storage and compute resources
• Databases and object storage
• Virtual machines
• Serverless compute resources
Cloud best practice
• Security, identity, and compliance
• Cloud architecture framework
• Automatic scaling and monitoring
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ExploreAI Academy | explore-datascience.net
Module 10
Integrated exams and
certification requirements
What is covered in this module:
Review
• Programme recap
• Opportunity to review content in preparation for exams
• Understanding the final assessment plan
Integrated examination
• Consolidated theory exam
• Practical programming assessment
• Applied machine learning exam
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