A Data Analytics course typically covers the essential skills and tools needed to analyze, interpret, and present data in meaningful ways. Below is an overview of what such a course may entail:
1. Introduction to Data Analytics
- Overview of Data Analytics: Introduction to data analytics, its importance in various industries, and the difference between descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics.
- Types of Data: Understanding structured and unstructured data, data sources, and data formats (e.g., CSV, Excel, JSON, XML).
2. Data Collection & Data Preparation
- Data Collection Techniques: Introduction to data collection methods (e.g., surveys, APIs, web scraping).
- Data Cleaning & Preprocessing: Techniques for handling missing data, outliers, and noise, as well as data transformations such as normalization, standardization, and encoding.
- Data Wrangling: Combining, reshaping, and aggregating data using tools like Pandas (in Python) or similar software.
3. Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA)
- Descriptive Statistics: Measures of central tendency (mean, median, mode), measures of spread (variance, standard deviation), and distributions.
- Data Visualization: Using tools like Matplotlib, Seaborn (Python), or Tableau to visualize data (e.g., bar charts, scatter plots, histograms, box plots).
- Correlations and Relationships: Analyzing relationships between variables using techniques like correlation coefficients and scatter plots.
4. Statistical Analysis
- Inferential Statistics: Introduction to hypothesis testing, p-values, confidence intervals, and t-tests.
- Probability: Basics of probability theory, probability distributions (e.g., normal distribution), and applying them to real-world data.
- Statistical Models: Understanding regression models, ANOVA, chi-square tests, etc.
5. Advanced Data Analytics Techniques
- Predictive Analytics: Introduction to machine learning algorithms (e.g., linear regression, decision trees, clustering, and classification).
- Time Series Analysis: Methods for forecasting, including ARIMA, and understanding seasonality and trends in data.
- Big Data Analytics: Working with large datasets using distributed computing (e.g., Hadoop, Spark).