JSC370 and JSC470: Data Science II and III

Winter 2021

Where and When

Course Structure

Tentative Schedule


Week 1: Background, motivation, course setup

January 12 Lecture: Video | Slides

January 12 Tutorial: Review of Python, Numpy, Pandas, Git, Colab Video


Week 2

January 19: Guest Lecture: Ben Allison, Principal Machine Learning Scientist at Amazon Video

January 21: Lecture on Latent variable models and collaborative filtering, intro to Assignment 1


Week 3

January 25: Lecture 3: Confounding, censoring, and assignment 1 lab. Video Assigment 1

Some links on confounding and Simpson’s paradox:

January 21: Assignment 1 Presentations Video


Week 4

Feb 1st: Assignment 1 due by midnight.

February 2nd: Guest Lecture: Farah Bastien, Manager, Data Science/Data Engineer at MLSE (Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment Partnership): Sports Analytics for the Leafs and the Raptors. Video

February 4th: Shapley values, causality, and Pearl’s do-calculus. Video


Week 5

February 9: Assignment 2 lab Video

February 11: Assignment 2 presentations Video


Week 6

Feb 17: Assignment 2 due by midnight.

Reading Week


Week 7

February 23: Guest Lecture: Wanying Zhao, Study design at Trilliam Foundation Video

February 25: Natural Language processing Video


Week 8

March 2nd: Assignment 3 Lab Video

March 4th: Assignment 3 presentations Video


Week 9

March 9: Guest Lecture: Alp Kucukelbir, Chief Scientist, Fero Labs Video

March 10th: Assignment 3 due by midnight.

March 11: Lecture: Time Series Video


Week 10

March 16: Assignment 4 Lab Video

March 18: Assignment 4 presentations


Week 11

March 22: Assignment 4 due by midnight.

March 23: Guest Lecture: Robert Grant, Cancer Genomics Video

March 25: Surival analysis and clustering Video

Related reading:


Week 12

March 30: Lecture 11: Assignmnent 5 lab Video

April 1: Assignment 5 presentations


Week 13

April 6: Lecture 12: Stochastic Variational Inference for capturing uncertainty Video

April 8: Short paper presentations

April 12: Assignment 5 due by midnight.


Extra reading: