Data Manipulation and Cleaning

In this workshop, we cover how to extract data from the web using Python. We focus on two approaches to extracting data from the web: leveraging application programming interfaces (APIs) and web scraping.

Machine learning often evokes images of Skynet, self-driving cars, and computerized homes. However, these ideas are less science fiction as they are tangible phenomena that are predicated on description, classification, prediction, and pattern recognition in data. During this two part workshop, we will discuss basic features of supervised machine learning algorithms including k-nearest neighbor, linear regression, decision tree, random forest, boosting, and ensembling using the tidymodels framework. To social scientists, such methods might be critical for investigating evolutionary relationships, global health patterns, voter turnout in local elections, or individual psychological diagnoses.

Pandas is a Python package that provides fast, flexible, and expressive data structures designed to make working with 'relational' or 'labeled' data both easy and intuitive. It enables doing practical, real world data analysis in Python. In this workshop, we'll work with example data and go through the various steps you might need to prepare data for analysis.

It is said that 80% of data analysis is spent on the process of cleaning and preparing the data for exploration, visualization, and analysis. This R workshop will introduce the dplyr and tidyr packages to make data wrangling and manipulation easier. Participants will learn how to use these packages to subset and reshape data sets, do calculations across groups of data, clean data, and other useful tasks.