CS125

Introduction to Data Analysis for

Social Sciences

Week 1
Introduction and overview.
Programming and Python Basics.
Course Information

• Course Management System:

• Moodle
• Course Hours:
• 2 hours lecture / 2 hours lab
• Lectures and labs are face-to-face.
• Assessments:
• 1 midterm 40%
• 1 final 40%
• 10 lab assignments 20%

2
Lab Assignments

• Students will attend weekly hands-on exercises during the lab session.
• There are 10 lab assignments to be completed during the weekly lab sessions.
• You will be graded for your performance and submission of your lab solutions.
• You must attend the lab session and upload your solution by the end of the
session to receive a grade.
• There are no make-ups for lab assignments. Special permission and medical
reports will not be accepted.
• You may not attend a lab other than the one to which you are registered.

3
Lab Grading and Attendance

• If you do not attend a lab, your grade for that lab will be zero.
• There are no make-up assignments for lab sessions, however in calculating your
lab average your lowest lab score will be discarded and your lab average will be
calculated using your top 9 lab scores.
• Students who do not attend the weekly lectures cannot receive full points for
the lab sessions.
• In order to receive full points for the lab assignments each week, you must
attend the lecture.
• Students who DO NOT attend the lecture but DO attend the lab session may
receive AT MOST 50% for the lab assignment.

4
Textbook

• There are 2 required textbooks for this course:

1. Python Data Science Handbook, Jake VanderPlas, O’Reilly. [download]

2. Fundamentals of Python Programming, Richard L. Halterman [download]

• Both books are open source and can be downloaded for free from the links given above.

5
What is Data Science?

• Data science is the study of data.

• It involves developing methods of recording, storing, and analyzing data to
effectively extract useful information.
• The goal of data science is to gain insights and knowledge from data.
• All fields use data science to analyze and interpret large sets of data.

6
 Why Learn Programming?

• Social scientists spend a lot of time analyzing large data sets.

• This involves writing relatively simple programs (scripts) that execute a
series of commands (storing data, merging datasets, parsing text documents,
etc.) to convert their data to a form they can analyze.
• Social scientists are generally interested in learning to use existing tools
effectively, rather than developing new tools.

7
What is Python

• A programming language is like any other language, it has a vocabulary and set of
grammatical rules for instructing a computer or computing device to perform
specific tasks.
• Python is a general-purpose programming language that can be used for a wide
variety of applications.
• Python is popular because there are many ready-made tools that are available
for data analysis.

8
 Software
• For the course, we will be using the Anaconda Python 3.9 Distribution.
• Anaconda contains:
• Python: a programming language in which we write computer programs.

• Python packages: For scientific computing and computational modelling, we need

additional libraries (packages) that are not part of the Python standard library.
These allow us to create plots, operate on matrices, analyze data and use
specialized numerical methods. Eg. numpy, pyplot, PANDAS etc.

• SPYDER: default development environment used to write and execute Python

programs.

• Jupyter Notebook: another tool to develop Python programs.

9
 How to Download Anaconda

• We recommend that you install the Anaconda Python 3.9 distribution using the
instructions found at the following link: Anaconda Python

• When you download Anaconda, you will have access to the tools used in the
course: Python, Spyder and Jupyter.

10
Online Development Environment

• During the lab sessions you should use Spyder to complete your work.
• However, for practice outside the labs, if you are away from your
computer and want to practice Python, we recommend the online
tool, replit.com.
• Replit requires you to create an account however it is free to use.

11
 First Python Commands
• A Python program is made up of one or more statements/commands, which are instructions
telling the computer to do something.

• Like in any language, statements must be meaningful and follow certain rules.

• When we type a command, the Python interpreter has to decide how to carry out the
command.

• If our command is not written correctly, the interpreter cannot understand what we are
asking, and will display an error message.

• Errors in the commands must be corrected for our statements to run (execute) correctly.

12
First Commands: Examples
• Step 1: Open the development environment.
• Step 2: Type the command(s).
• Step 3: Evaluate the results.
Try the following:

13
Things to Notice
• Whitespace characters:
• Include spaces, newlines, tabs and they make programs and commands easier to read.
• Notice in the examples, we put spaces before and after the arithmetic operators ( 3 + 5 )
• This is an example of using whitespace to improve readability.
• The python interpreter ignores these extra characters, as they are for the reader of the
program (us!) rather than the interpreter.
• With the spaces removed, the program would behave in the same way.

• Also notice that for multiplication, we use the ‘*’ symbol instead of 3 x 5.
• These are examples of the syntax rules of python, which we will discuss in
detail next week.
14
 print() statement
• Python provides functions to carry out common tasks, the print
function is an example of this.
• The print() statement allows us to print messages to the console
window in our programs.
• print() can echo text strings, numbers or calculations.
• Text strings should be between single or double quotes.
• If we would like to output multiple values, we can separate them with
a comma.

15
 First Commands: print()
• Try the following:

16
Printing Special Characters
• Sometimes we want to include characters in our output that have
special meaning.
• This includes characters such as quotes, newlines, etc.
• The table below shows a number of special characters in python.
Special Meaning
Character
\n New line character
\t Tab character
\\ Backslash character
\’ Single quote
\” Double quote
17
Printing Special Characters - Examples
Example 1:

Example 2:

18