From the course: A Day In The Life of a Data Scientist

Exploratory data

From the course: A Day In The Life of a Data Scientist

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Exploratory data

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- My name is Lacey Westphal I work at Alliance College-Ready Public Schools as a manager of Academic Data Analysis My job involves working with various people within the organization to identify areas where we can improve student outcomes in terms of student performance, academic performance and helping to direct strategies that may help us with those goals. I personally really enjoy exploratory data analysis Which is taking a data set that I don't know that much about and trying to understand really what's in it and what can be done with it. That type of analysis is really easy to do with data sets that are publicly available and it allows you to really think about a different set of questions then maybe you would in your role. So if I'm thinking about crime in LA I can download a crime data set and start to look into what that looks like and maybe I can find another data set that would supplement the information in there and be able to pull out new insights that haven't been pulled out before So being able to take something that already exists combine it with something else and find something new is really exciting. It is also really challenging as well because it very easy to make connections that don't actually exist. Correlation vs. Causation's So it helps to train you to be a little bit more careful in how your looking at a data set Especially if you aren't familiar with it Which is something that A lot of us do in our free time when we are trying to hone our skills and it's hard to get the feedback on that analysis that you would normally get from working in a role or working at a company. Being able to do that on your own and thinking about problems from a different perspective is really helpful.

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