Weekly Summary

Week[2]: [Data Collection and Data Preparation]

Data Collection and Data Preparation are foundational steps in any data
science project, ensuring that the data is relevant, clean, and ready for
analysis. Data collection involves gathering data from various sources, which
may include public datasets, surveys, or web scraping. This data is often
unstructured or noisy, requiring significant preparation before use. Data
preparation, also known as data preprocessing, involves cleaning and
transforming this raw data to enhance its quality. Key tasks in this stage
include handling missing values, removing duplicates, and managing outliers
to prevent them from skewing results.
Data transformation and standardization further prepare the data for analysis
by scaling features and encoding categorical variables. Exploratory Data
Analysis (EDA) is also part of data preparation, helping to uncover patterns,
distributions, and relationships within the data through statistical summaries
and visualizations. Visualization libraries like Matplotlib and Seaborn assist in
this process, making it easier to interpret trends and correlations. Together,
data collection and preparation form a crucial pipeline that transforms raw
data into a structured, usable format for effective analysis and modeling.

Day 1
 Topic:
Introduction to Data Collection Techniques
 Objective:
Understand methods of data collection and obtain sample datasets.
 Activity/Assignment/Experiment/Practical:
Learn about various data collection methods, including web scraping
and accessing public datasets. Practice downloading datasets from
sources like Kaggle, UCI Machine Learning Repository, or government
websites.
 Learning Outcomes:
Understand the role and importance of data collection in data science.
 Gain experience accessing and downloading real-world datasets.
 Challenges Faced:
Identifying reliable data sources and understanding data formats.
 Skills Developed/Improved:
Data sourcing, basic data handling.

Day 2
 Topic:
Web Scraping Techniques
 Objective:
Learn the basics of web scraping to gather data from websites.
 Activity/Assignment/Experiment/Practical:
Explore web scraping libraries like Beautiful Soup and Scrapy in Python.
Practice extracting simple data from web pages, such as titles, texts, or
tables.
 Learning Outcomes:
Understand the fundamentals of web scraping and its applications. Gain
practical experience in extracting data from websites.
 Challenges Faced:
Navigating HTML structures and handling webpage restrictions.
 Skills Developed/Improved:
Web scraping, HTML parsing, data extraction.

Day 3
 Topic:
Data Cleaning – Handling Missing Values, Outliers, and Duplicates
 Objective:
Learn techniques to clean and preprocess data for analysis.
 Activity/Assignment/Experiment/Practical:
Practice handling missing values (e.g., filling, interpolation, or removal).
Identify and remove duplicates and handle outliers through methods
like capping and transformation.
  Learning Outcomes:
Understand the importance of clean data and how to handle incomplete
or inconsistent data. Gain skills in using Python libraries (e.g., Pandas)
for data cleaning.
 Challenges Faced:
Deciding appropriate methods to handle missing values and outliers.
 Skills Developed/Improved:
Data preprocessing, handling real-world data inconsistencies.

Day 4
 Topic:
Data Transformation, Standardization, and Feature Scaling
 Objective:
Learn techniques to transform data and prepare it for machine learning.
 Activity/Assignment/Experiment/Practical:
Practice data transformations like normalization, encoding categorical
variables, and feature scaling. Understand the importance of scaling in
algorithms sensitive to feature magnitudes.
 Learning Outcomes:
Learn to apply transformations to data for consistent and meaningful
analysis. Understand why and how to apply feature scaling for machine
learning.
 Challenges Faced:
Choosing the right transformation methods for different data types.
 Skills Developed/Improved:
Data standardization, feature engineering, data preprocessing.

Day 5
 Topic:
Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA)
  Objective:
Perform EDA to understand data distribution, relationships, and
patterns.
 Activity/Assignment/Experiment/Practical:
Conduct EDA using techniques like examining summary statistics,
correlation, and detecting patterns. Use Pandas and visualization tools
to explore and interpret data characteristics.
 Learning Outcomes:
Gain insights into data through exploration, helping to inform data
preparation decisions. Develop skills in EDA to assess data quality and
understand trends.
 Challenges Faced:
Interpreting correlations and identifying significant patterns.
 Skills Developed/Improved:
EDA, statistical analysis, data interpretation.

Day 6
 Topic:
Data Visualization and Statistical Summarization
 Objective:
Use visualization libraries to create insightful plots and summarize data.
 Activity/Assignment/Experiment/Practical:
Practice creating visualizations using Matplotlib and Seaborn to
represent data distributions, relationships, and trends. Generate
statistical summaries and extract insights for better data understanding.
 Learning Outcomes:
Learn to effectively visualize data for better insights and
communication. Gain skills in summarizing data and extracting key
insights from visualizations.
 Challenges Faced:
Choosing the right visualization type for different data aspects.
 Skills Developed/Improved:
Data visualization, statistical summarization, interpretation of visual
data.