Syllabus

Welcome to Data Science Programming II! In this course, we will learn object-oriented programming to create tree and graph data structures to represent hierarchical data and implement algorithms for efficiently searching these structures.

We'll often create our own datasets, using techniques like logging, benchmarking, web scraping, and A/B testing.

In the last third of the semester we'll explore some basic machine learning techniques, including regression, classification, clustering, and decomposition.

Additions To Syllabus Made During Semester

Course Instructor

Lectures (Meeting Time and Location)

Lecture recordings will be provided, but is subject to change based on in-person attendance. In-person attendance is expected. Attendance will be recorded via TopHat (or other tool). Also, on paper attendance may be taken on random days. If attendance is healthy and it feels like people are keeping up, I'll usually be posting recordings. If the attendance drops, I will stop posting recordings (warning will be issued one lecture prior to this change). Additionally, if there will be any technical issues, lecture recordings may not be provided.

Instructional Modality

Communication

We message the class regularly via @wisc.edu email and/or Canvas announcements. We recommend updating your Canvas settings so that the "Announcement" option is "Notify immediately" so that you don't miss something important. Also, you are supposed to check your @wisc.edu email regularly.

See the help page for details about how to contact us.

We have various forms for us to leave (optionally anonymous) feedback, report grading issue and exam conflict, and thank TAs/mentors.

Grading

Your overall grade is based on the following:

Letter Grades

At the end of the semester, we will assign final grades based on these thresholds:

We will not be rounding off scores at the end of the semester.

Note: As mentioned above, we will drop one lowest grading quiz and three lowest grading labs. However, if you miss any activity of a grade item (for example, labs and quizzes), you must enter a zero grade for that grade item activity to accurately calculate your total grades during the semester, that is, you must replace hyphen - sign with a 0 grade for a missed activity of any grade item to accurately calculate your total grades during the semester.

Graded Component Details

Lecture attendance

I will take attendance using TopHat (or other tool). However, if I feel that there are sufficient number of students present in the lecture, I may not take attendance on that day to save time, and every student will be considered present on that day.

Lab attendance

We'll post a lab activities document on the dates mentioned on the schedule page. You can work through it individually, or with your assigned study group. TAs and peer mentors will walk around to answer questions and check your progress in finishing the lab activities. You don't have to finish every lab activity, but sufficient (as determined by the Lab TA) working progress is needed. If you have extra time at the lab after completing the lab document, you can work on projects with your assigned study group.

Projects

Submission: Everybody will individually upload either a .py or a .ipynb or other file(s) (as specified) for each project.

Collaboration: Even though everybody will make their individual submission, every project will have (1) a group part to be optionally done with your assigned study group and (2) an individual part. For the group part, any form of help from anybody in your group is allowed; I recommend you find times for everybody on the group to work at the same time so you can help each other through coding difficulties in this part. You're also welcome to do the "group" part individually, or with a subset of your assigned study group. For the individual part, you may only receive help from course staff (instructors/TAs/peer mentors); you may not discuss this part with anybody else (in the class or otherwise) or get help from them.

Late Policy:

Code Review: TAs will give you comments on specific parts of your assignment. This feedback process is called a "code review", and is a common requirement in industry before a programmer is allowed to add their code changes to the main codebase. TAs will also include reasons for deductions in the comments. Read your code reviews carefully; even if you receive 100% on your work, we'll often give you tips to save effort in the future.

Project Grading: Grades will be largely based on automatic tests that we run. We'll share the tests with you before the due date, so you should rarely be too surprised by your grade. Though it shouldn't be common, we may deduct points for serious hardcoding, not following directions, or other issues. Some bugs (called non-deterministic bugs) don't show up every time code is run -- if you have such an issues, we may give you a different grade based on the tester than what you were expecting based on when you ran it. Finally, our tests aren't very good at evaluating whether plots and other visualizations look how they should (a human usually needs to evaluate that). Note: to get your project graded, you must do the following:

That is, to get a project graded, you must submit your project as mentioned on the Labs and Projects page and make a merge request for the project. Additionally, you must make sure that the pipline is pass and it is giving you grades. You should be able to see the grades given to you by the autograder.

Auto-grader: The autograder will be run soon (usually within a minute) after your project submission. The autograder usually grades the projects within 1 minute. However, it may take around 2 minutes. If any project takes more then 10 mintues to get autograded, then that project will be given a zero grade. You must check the output of the pipline to see the grades given to you by the autograder. If the autograder does not give you any grade for a project then that means you are given a zero grade for the project. Note that the manual grade deductions will be on top of deductions made by the autograder. We expect you to try submitting your project early and make sure nothing crashes. However, this should not be a substitute for running tester.py or grader.py locally.

Allowed Packages: anything that comes pre-installed with Python and any packages used during the lectures and listed in the projects are allowed. Using unapproved packages may result in a score of zero when submitted for grading because the autograder won't be able to run your code without those packages.

Quizzes

There will be 10 quizzes due on dates as specified on the schedule page. Make sure you know the rules regarding what is allowed and what is not. Each quiz will be allowed to be taken twice with unlimited time (in given number of days), but the quiz score will be the average score of both the attempts.

Allowed
NOT allowed

Midterms and Final

These will be multiple-choice exams taken Canvas (online exams) with Honorlock.

Readings

We'll sometimes assign readings from the following sources (all free):

Cheating

Yeah, of course you shouldn't cheat, but what is cheating? The most common form of academic misconduct in these classes involves copying/sharing code for programming projects. Here's an overview of what you can and cannot do:

Acceptable

NOT Acceptable

Citing Code: you can copy small snippets of code from stackoverflow (and other online references) if you cite them. For example, suppose I need to write some code that gets the median number from a list of numbers. I might search for "how to get the median of a list in python" and find a solution at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24101524/finding-median-of-list-in-python.

I could (legitimately) post code from that page in my code, as long as it has a comment as follows: 

    # copied/adapted from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24101524/finding-median-of-list-in-python
    def median(lst):
      sortedLst = sorted(lst)
      lstLen = len(lst)
      index = (lstLen - 1) // 2

      if (lstLen % 2):
        return sortedLst[index]
      else:
        return (sortedLst[index] + sortedLst[index + 1])/2.0

In contrast, copying from a nearly complete project (that accomplishes what you're trying to do for your project) is not OK. When in doubt, ask us! The best way to stay out of trouble is to be completely transparent about what you're doing.

Similarity Detection: We will use automated tools to look for similarities across submissions. We take cheating detection seriously to make the course fair to students who put in the honest effort.