The Department of Computer Science and Engineering is offering a machine learning course focused on social science data.
Happold Professor of Sociology Bilal Khan will be teaching “CSCE 496/896 and SOCI 498/898: Applied Machine Learning in the Social Sciences” this fall.
“Machine learning approaches developed in computer science and tech industries hold exciting promise for advancing the social sciences,” Khan said.
The course aims to provide students with experiences through which to build abilities that will help them succeed in the data science field, which extend beyond numerical analysis.
“Being competitive in the data science job market requires more than just being a whiz at ‘crunching numbers,’” Khan said. “Corporate and research applications of data science require having the ability to link raw data to contextual domain knowledge which informs meaningful analyses that yield new knowledge and translate to desired outcomes.”
The course will offered online, but will provide a hands-on comprehensive overview of machine learning, using contemporary big data from a number of social science disciplines, as well as the Twitter API, and Facebook's CrowdTangle. It will also include introductions to Python, Jupyter notebooks, and scikit-learn, and will span data exploration, visualization, and modeling. Students will have the opportunity to learn more about linear classifiers, support vector machines, decision trees and random forests, PCA, k-means clustering, and artificial neural networks.
Students interested in enrolling the course can still register online and contact Dr. Bilal Khan (bkhan2@unl.edu) with any questions.