A typical data

science project comprises three stages Data Analysis, Machine Learning, and
working with the results. This video provides
an overview of each stage. Let's start by taking
a closer look at Data Analysis. The goal in this stage
is to learn more about your data before
trying to learn from it. It's helpful to begin
with an idea of what you want to
learn from your data, and what you want to do
with that knowledge. Your project may also have
more specific deliverables. The next step is to
identify the types, amounts, and sources of data
needed for your project. Your data may already exist, or you may be generating
new data from experiments, surveys,
or simulations. Once your data is available, you can access it using MATLAB. The
method you use for
each source depends on the data location,
type, and size. MATLB can load smaller files
directly and it can also pull remote data from databases
and Streaming sources. Larger datasets can be sampled, or loaded and analyzed
in smaller chunks. Next, it's time to
learn about your data through exploration
and visualization. First, check for
missing, incomplete, or duplicated data that will
complicate your analysis, and produce misleading results. Next, get a sense of how
your data is organized, and what type of information
each variable contains. Information about variables including their values, range,
distribution, and
outliers can be obtained using MATLAB statistical,
and summary functions. Use grouping functions
in MATLAB to study these properties
in finer detail. Visualizations like histograms
and scatter plots offer another quick and effective way to learn how variable
values are distributed and help you identify
potential relationships. Lastly, it's time to accomplish your specific Data
Analysis goals, by computing the statistics, investigating the trends
or correlations, or creating the visualizations
you set out to obtain. What you learned about your data while exploring and
visualizing should provide context and give you confidence in your results. Before
discussing what
to do with your results, let's look at
an additional component of many data science projects that often follows Data
Analysis, using your data to
model relationships between variables
or observations. Machine Learning is
the process of using algorithms to obtain a model
of these relationships. In particular,
Machine Learning algorithms take a general model
and adapt it to describe a specific
relationship using data to solve for
one or more model parameters. You'll learn more about Machine Learning in
a future course, but for now the process
can be summarized in the following steps: model
and variable selection, data preprocessing, model
training, and model validation. The result is
a trained validated model, you can then use your prediction,
and further analysis. After completing
the Data Analysis or Machine Learning stage
of your project, you can start working
with your results. First, check your work
for mistakes, and make sure your results
are reproducible. That is they don't rely on unreasonable assumptions
or suffer from bias. Once you are satisfied
with your methods and confident in
your quantitative results, you can use them to draw
conclusions and generate the qualitative understanding
you were looking for. Finally, share
your results through visualizations,
presentations, and reports. You might also make your
data and code available so that your work can be used
in extended by others. More recently, publishing
custom reports and metrics using
automated dashboards, and deploying predictive models
to automated systems have become popular uses for sharing data science results. In
the next video, you'll see an example of a Data Analysis
Workflow in practice.