Leonard Apeltsin

Are you ready to work out with the Data Science Bookcamp? This series of liveProjects takes you hands-on with fun and engaging data science challenges from the bestselling book by Leonard Apeltsin. It features Discovering Disease Outbreaks from News Headlines, which he co-created with Will Koehrsen, Nate George’s Decoding Data Science Job Postings to Improve Your Resume, and three original projects by Emre Rencberoglu. Each challenge stretches your data science muscles and teaches you useful new skills through practice, such as using NumPy and SciPy for mathematical operations, clustering with scikit-learn, and analyzing and visualizing network datasets with NetworkX. Tackle them individually or all of them for an intensive workout of your data capabilities!

A primer for social network analysis using Python’s NetworkX graph analysis library.

A demonstration of xClustering of large text datasets in Python.

In this liveProject, you’ll take on the role of a data scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO). The WHO is responsible for responding to international epidemics, a critical component of which involves monitoring global news headlines for signs of disease outbreaks. However, this daily deluge of news data is too huge to manually analyze. Your challenge is to pull geographic information from headlines, and determine where in the world outbreaks are occurring. Problems you will have to solve include extracting information from text using regular expressions, using the Basemap Matplotlib extension to visualize map locations for patterns indicating an epidemic, and reporting your findings to your superiors so resources can be dispatched.

Data Science Bookcamp doesn’t stop with surface-level theory and toy examples. As you work through each project, you’ll learn how to troubleshoot common problems like missing data, messy data, and algorithms that don’t quite fit the model you’re building. You’ll appreciate the detailed setup instructions and the fully explained solutions that highlight common failure points. In the end, you’ll be confident in your skills because you can see the results.