Data Mining Course in Houston

We have just completed an Introduction to Data Mining, a graduate course at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, Houston. The course was given in September and consisted of seven two-hour lectures, each one followed with a homework assignment. The course was attended by about 40 students and some faculty and research staff.

This was a challenging course. The audience was new to data mining, and we decided to teach them with the newest, third version of Orange. We also experimented with two course instructors (Blaz and Janez), who, instead of splitting the course into two parts, taught simultaneously, one on the board and the other one helping the students with hands-on exercises. To check whether this worked fine, we ran a student survey at the end of the course. We used Google Sheets and then examined the results with students in the class. Using Orange, of course.

And the outcome? Looks like the students really enjoyed the course

and the teaching style.

The course took advantage of several new widgets in Orange 3, including those for data preprocessing and polynomial regression. The core development team put a lot of effort during the summer to debug and polish this newest version of Orange. Also thanks to the financial support by AXLE EU FP7 and CARE-MI EU FP7** grants and grants by the Slovene Research agency, we were able to finish everything in time.