Data Science
Excited about self-driving cars and voice recognition?
What about researching human behavior using social media?
Can you recognize the key features embedded in data?
The field of data science focuses on learning methods to extract meaning and the hidden truth from data. Sound interesting? It really is! It's a combination of techniques and theories from many fields including mathematics, computers science, statistics, machine learning, pattern recognition, communication studies and ethics.
Bloomsburg University's data science major equips you to draw conclusions from data, using knowledge of statistical inference, computational technology, data management skills and related theories. Study practical and scientific topics, learning how to carry out analyses of data through the full cycle of the investigative process. Participate in a project-based capstone course that synthesizes the skills and knowledge learned in the various disciplines that encompass data science. BU’s Department of Mathematical and Digital Sciences is ready to help you become a data scientist.
What you will learn in data science
- Foundations in Mathematics, Statistics and Programming
- Data visualization, communication and interpretation skills
- Data management technologies including:
- Machine learning algorithms. For example, but not limited to:
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» Databases and Hadoop
» Cloud storage and cloud computing
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» k-nearest neighbors (kNN)
» Logistic regression, Ridge regression and LASSO
» Decision trees and Random Forests
» Naïve Bayes
» Support vector machine (SVM)
» Convolutional neural network (cNN)
Data Science
Program Director
William Calhoun | wcalhoun@bloomu.edu
Ben Franklin Hall 215
570-389-4500
Data Science Program
Demand is strong and rapidly growing
Data science is among the fastest growing careers in the job market, and data scientists earn high salaries. Become a business intelligence analyst, data mining engineer, or data architect, just to name a few potential job titles, according to simplilearn.com. Data scientists are a new generation of analytical data experts who have the theoretical background and technical skills to solve complex problems, as well as the curiosity to explore the significant new problems of the future.
Kaggle Competition
Kaggle is a platform for predictive modeling and analytics competitions in which statisticians and data miners compete to produce the best models for predicting and describing the datasets uploaded by companies and users. This crowdsourcing approach relies on the fact that there are countless strategies that can be applied to any predictive modelling task and it is impossible to know beforehand which technique or analyst will be most effective.
Kaggle has run over 200 data science competitions since the it was founded. It is best known as the platform hosting the $3 million Heritage Health Prize. Other competitions have looked at improving gesture recognition for Microsoft Kinect, or at improving the search for the Higgs boson at CERN.
Competitions have resulted in many successful projects including furthering the state of the art in HIV research, chess ratings and traffic forecasting. Several academic papers have been published on the basis of findings made in Kaggle competitions. A key to this is the effect of the live leaderboard, which encourages participants to continue innovating beyond existing best practice.