BDTN 2016 Workshop: Introduction to Data Science

Every year BEST Ljubljana organizes BEST Days of Technology and Sciences, an event hosting a broad variety of workshops, hackathons and lectures for the students of natural sciences and technology. Introduction to Data Science, organized by our own Laboratory for Bioinformatics, was this year one of them.

Related: Intro to Data Mining for Life Scientists

The task was to teach and explain basic data mining concepts and techniques in four hours. To complete beginners. Not daunting at all...

Luckily, we had Orange at hand. First, we showed how the program works and how to easily import data into the software. We created a poll using Google Forms on the fly and imported the results from Google Sheets into Orange.

To get the first impression of our data, we used Distributions and Scatter Plot. This was just to show how to approach the construction and simple visual exploration on any new data set. Then we delved deep into the workings of classification with Classification Tree and Tree Viewer and showed how easy it is to fall into the trap of overfitting (and how to avoid it). Another topic was clustering and how to relate similar data instances to one another. Finally, we had some fun with ImageAnalytics add-on and observed whether we can detect wrongly labelled microscopy images with machine learning.

Related: Data Mining Course in Houston #2

These workshops are not only fun, but an amazing learning opportunity for us as well, as they show how our users think and how to even further improve Orange.