This course has concluded. See https://poloclub.github.io/#cse6242 for all past course offerings.

CSE6242 / CX4242, Fall 2015
Data and Visual Analytics

Georgia Tech, College of Computing

4:30 - 6pm, Clough 152, Tue & Thu
Prof. Duen Horng (Polo) Chau

This course will introduce you to broad classes of techniques and tools for analyzing and visualizing data at scale. It emphasizes on how to combine computation and visualization to perform effective analysis. We will cover methods from each side, and hybrid ones that combine the best of both worlds. Students will work in small teams to complete a research project exploring novel approaches for interactive data & visual analytics.

Office Hours

Polo Chau Tue, 3-4pm Klaus 1324
Meera Manohar Kamath Wed, 10.30-11.30am Klaus 2126
Gopi Krishnan Nambiar Tue, 12-1pm CCB common area (1st floor)
Siddharth Rajendra Raja Wed, 3-4pm TSRB 243 (Tentative)
Ramakrishnan (Ramki) Kannan Mon, 3-4pm Klaus 1305
Akanksha Thu, 3-4pm CCB common area (1st floor)

Schedule & Lectures

Video recordings of the lectures are available at http://gtcourses.gatech.edu.

Date Topic Tue Thu Events
Aug 18, 20 * Course introduction
* Big data analytics building blocks, data Collection, and simple storage (SQLite)
Slides slides  
25, 27 * Data cleaning & integration
* Data Mining Concepts & Tasks
slides slides HW1 out
Sept 1, 3 * Dimensionality Reduction: techniques, visualization, practitioner's guide -- by Ramakrishnan Kannan
* Visualization DOs and DON'Ts; Heilmeier Questions
slides slides
8, 10 * Example project: Wenwen Chang on Predicting Fire Risks in Atlanta
* Visualization fundamentals by Chad Stolper
Wenwen's slides
slides
Chad's vis101 slides HW1 due (Fri, 11:55pm)
15, 17 * Data visualization for the web (D3) by Chad Stolper
* Graph analytics
  • how to build and store graphs
  • basics; power laws; centrality
  • graph statistics and how to compute them (algorithms)
* Interactive graph applications
Chad's D3 slides slides Form project teams by Friday;
HW2 out
22, 24 * Continuing with graphs
* Scaling up: Hadoop, Pig
slides slides
29, 1 * Scaling up: HBase, Hive

slides Q&A HW2 due (Fri, 10/2, 11:55pm)
Oct 6, 8 Project proposal presentations Show time! Show time! Project proposal & slides due (Mon, 10/5, 11:55pm)
13, 15 * Scaling up: Spark, Spark SQL
Student recess; no class slides
20, 22 * Classification concepts, cross validation, k nearest neighbors, decision tree
slides Flavio Villanustre, VP, HPCC Systems & LexisNexis HW3 out
27, 29 * Ensemble method, bagging, random forests
* Classification (visualization & interaction)
* Recommender Systems by Ramakrishnan Kannan
slides Ramki's slides
Nov 3, 5 Analytics in practice: Nikolaos Vasiloglou II
* Clustering
Nick's slides slides HW3 due (Fri, 11/6, 11:55pm)
10, 12 * Text analytics: concepts
* Text analytics: algorithms (LSI=SVD)
* Time series: algorithms, visualization, & applications
slides slides HW4 out
Project progress report due (Fri, 11:55pm EST)
17, 19 * Time series: algorithms, visualization, & applications
slides
24, 26 Thanksgiving X X
Dec 1, 3 * Closing words and course overview
* Project poster presentations
Poster presentation. 5pm to 6pm-ish. Klaus 1116. Pizza + drinks served! Proj final report due (Fri, 11:55pm EST)

Announcements and Discussion on Piazza

We use Piazza for discussion and all announcements.

Post your questions there. Our teaching staff and your fellow classmates will help answer them quickly. You can also use Pizza to find project teammates.

T-square will only be used for submission of assignments and projects.

While we welcome everyone to share their experiences in tackling issues and helping each other out, but please do not post your answers, as that may affect the learning experience of your fellow classmates.

Homework (50% of grade)

The fastest way to get help with homework assignments is to post your questions on Piazza. If you prefer that your question addresses to only our TAs and the instructor, you can use the private post feature (i.e., check the "Individual Students(s) / Instructors(s)" radio box).
While collaboration is allowed for homework assignments, each student must write up their own answers. All GT students must observe the honor code. Any suspected plagiarism and academic misconduct will be reported and directly handled by the Office of Student Integrity (OSI).
We plan to have 4 assignments in total.

Project (50% of grade)

See project description. See the schedule table above for deliverable due dates.

Late Submissions Policy

Distance Learning Sections (Q & Q3)

A standard 3-day lag applies to all homework and project deliverables.  For project presentation, a group that has DL student member can choose to:
  1. Present in class without 3-day lag; or 
  2. Submit a video presentation with 3-day lag (e.g., screen capture)

Dataset Ideas (may need API, or scraping)

Reading materials & Resources

Data Science

Visualization

SQL

Prerequisites & Expectation

For both CSE 6242 (grad) and CX 4242 (undergrad)

Students are expected to complete significant programming assignments (homework, project) that may involve higher-level languages or scripting (e.g., Java, R, Matlab, Python, C++, etc.).

Some assignments may involve web programming and D3 (e.g., Javascript, CSS).

You are expected to quickly learn many new things. For example, an assignment on Hadoop programming may require you to learn some basic Java and Scala quickly, which should not be too challenging if you already know another high-level language like Python or C++. Please make sure you are comfortable with this.

Please take a look at the assignments (homework and project) of the previous offerings of this course, which will give you some idea about the difficulty level of the assignments.

Basic linear algebra, probability knowledge is expected.

Additional formal prerequisites for CSE 6242

None, but you should have taken courses similar to those listed in the next section, at Georgia Tech or at another school.

Additional formal prerequisites for CX 4242

(Undergraduate Semester level MATH 2605 Minimum Grade of D or
Undergraduate Semester level MATH 2401 Minimum Grade of D or
Undergraduate Semester level MATH 24X1 Minimum Grade of D) or
and
(Undergraduate Semester level MATH 3215 Minimum Grade of D or
Undergraduate Semester level MATH 3225 Minimum Grade of D or
Undergraduate Semester level ECE 3077 Minimum Grade of D or
Undergraduate Semester level ISYE 2027 Minimum Grade of D)
and
(Undergraduate Semester level CS 1371 Minimum Grade of C or
Undergraduate Semester level CS 1372 Minimum Grade of C or
Undergraduate Semester level CX 4010 Minimum Grade of C or
Undergraduate Semester level CX 4240 Minimum Grade of C)

If you want to audit this course...

You must first obtain instructor's permission, then enroll in the course. The auditor must attend all lectures, and optionally complete the assignments.

Previous offerings

See https://poloclub.github.io/#cse6242 for all past course offerings.

Acknowledgements & Related Classes

We thank Amazon's AWS in Education grant program for providing support for Amazon Web Services.
Tableau's data visualization software is provided through the Tableau for Teaching program.

Many thanks to my colleagues for sharing their course materials:
Prof. John Stasko - Information Visualization - Fall 2012
Prof. Jeff Heer - Research Topics in Interactive Data Analysis - Spring 2011
Prof. Christos Faloutsos - Multimedia Databases and Data Mining - Fall 2012