Week 4: CST383 Introduction to Data Science

   This week felt especially good because it finally felt like we were working with real data and making something out of it. The second lecture video on Two discrete or categorical variables: visualization was honestly confusing was at first. It was easier to go through the slides on my own then watching the lecture. Having the slides in front of me while watching made a big difference, because I could pause, reread, and connect what was being said to the actual examples. 

    The campaign contributions assignment was hard but fun. Seeing actual candidate names and familiar concepts made the work more engaging and motivating. It didn’t feel like abstract numbers! I know this is not ideal because not every data we will work on will be familiar. What stood out was that unemployed contributors were overrepresented in the number of contributions!!. It’s also possible that “unemployed” was selected inconsistently, which raises questions about data quality and interpretation( unrelated but am I overthinking?). Also made me realize how easy it is to misinterpret plots if you don’t pay close attention to what exactly is being measured.

    Having access to the solution manual or model output was very helpful(Thank you professor!). Many of the questions could be interpreted in multiple ways, so being able to see the actual output clarified expectations. I honestly wish the final exam will be in a similar format, because it helps focus learning on understanding not just guessing what the instructions mean.

    One issue I ran into was with plotting, plt.ylabel kept throwing errors in the campaign_exploration homework, and I still don’t fully understand why the error happened in that specific context. That’s something I want to get clearer on how Pandas, Seaborn, and matplotlib interact, and when certain functions override or conflict with each other.

    Overall, this week helped solidify my understanding of how to choose appropriate visualizations based on data types. and hands-on practice made this week one of the most enjoyable so far.