NANODEGREE PROGR AM SYLL ABUS

Data Scientist

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Overview
The Data Scientist Nanodegree program is an advanced program designed to prepare you for data scientist
jobs. As such, you should have a high comfort level with a variety of topics before starting the program. In
order to successfully complete this program, we strongly recommend that the following prerequisites are
fulfilled. If you do not have the necessary prerequisites, Udacity has courses and programs that prepare you
for this Nanodegree program.

Programming:
• Python Programming: Writing functions, logic, control flow, and building basic applications, as well as
common data analysis libraries like NumPy and pandas
• SQL programming: Querying databases using joins, aggregations, and subqueries
• Comfortable with using the Terminal, version control in Git, and using GitHub

Probability and Statistics:

• Descriptive Statistics: Calculating measures of center and spread, estimation distributions
• Inferential Statistics: Sampling distributions, hypothesis testing
• Probability: Probability theory, conditional probability

Mathematics:
• Calculus: Maximizing and minimizing algebraic equations
• Linear Algebra: Matrix manipulation and multiplication

Data wrangling:
• Accessing database, CSV, and JSON data
• Data cleaning and transformations using pandas and Sklearn

Data visualization with matplotlib:

• Exploratory data analysis and visualization
• Explanatory data visualizations and dashboards

Machine Learning:
• Feature Engineering
• Supervised Learning: Regression, classification, decision trees, random forest
• Unsupervised Learning: PCA, Clustering

The following programs can prepare you to take this nanodegree program. There are also several free
courses that you can use to prepare.
• Programming for Data Science with Python.
• Data Analyst Nanodegree Program.
• Intro to Machine Learning Nanodegree Program

Educational Objectives: The ultimate goal of the Data Scientist Nanodegree program is for you to learn the
skills you need to perform well as a data scientist. As a graduate of this program, you will be able to:
• Use Python and SQL to access and analyze data from several different data sources.

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Overview
• Use principles of statistics and probability to design and execute A/B tests and recommendation
engines to assist businesses in making data-automated decisions..
• Deploy a data science solution to a basic flask app.
• Manipulate and analyze distributed datasets using Apache Spark.
• Communicate results effectively to stakeholders.

I N CO L L A B O R AT I O N W I T H

Estimated Time: Prerequisites:

4 Months at Python, SQL &
10hrs/week Statistics

Flexible Learning: Need Help?

Self-paced, so udacity.com/advisor
you can learn on Discuss this program
the schedule that with an enrollment
works best for you advisor.

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Course 1: Solving Data Science Problems
Learn the data science process, including how to build effective data visualizations, and how to
communicate with various stakeholders.

In this project, you will choose a dataset, identify three questions,

Course Project and analyze the data to find answers to these questions. You will
create a GitHub repository with your project, and write a blog post
Write a Data Science
to communicate your findings to the appropriate audience. This
Blog Post project will help you reinforce and extend your knowledge of
machine learning, data visualization, and communication

LEARNING OUTCOMES

• Apply the CRISP-DM process to business applications

• Wrangle, explore, and analyze a dataset
• Apply machine learning for prediction
The Data Science
LESSON ONE • Apply statistics for descriptive and inferential
Process
understanding
• Draw conclusions that motivate others to act on your
results

• Implement best practices in sharing your code and written

summaries
Communicating with
LESSON TWO • Learn what makes a great data science blog
Stakeholders
• Learn how to create your ideas with the data science
community

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Course 2: Software Engineering for
Data Scientists
Develop software engineering skills that are essential for data scientists, such as creating unit tests and
building classes.

LEARNING OUTCOMES

• Write clean, modular, and well-documented code

• Refactor code for efficiency
Software Engineering • Create unit tests to test programs
LESSON ONE
Practices • Write useful programs in multiple scripts
• Track actions and results of processes with logging
• Conduct and receive code reviews

• Understand when to use object oriented programming

• Build and use classes
• Understand magic methods
Object Oriented • Write programs that include multiple classes, and follow
LESSON TWO
Programming good code structure
• Learn how large, modular Python packages, such as pandas
and scikit-learn, use object oriented programming
• Portfolio Exercise: Build your own Python package

• Learn about the components of a web app

• Build a web application that uses Flask, Plotly, and the
LESSON THREE Web Development Bootstrap framework
• Portfolio Exercise: Build a data dashboard using a dataset
of your choice and deploy it to a web application

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Course 3: Data Engineering for Data Scientists
Learn to work with data through the entire data science process, from running pipelines, transforming data,
building models, and deploying solutions to the cloud.

Figure Eight (formerly Crowdflower) crowdsourced the tagging and

Course Project translation of messages to apply artificial intelligence to disaster
Build Disaster Response response relief. In this project, you’ll build a data pipeline to prepare
Pipelines with Figure the message data from major natural disasters around the world.
You’ll build a machine learning pipeline to categorize emergency text
Eight messages based on the need communicated by the sender.

LEARNING OUTCOMES

• Understand what ETL pipelines are

• Access and combine data from CSV, JSON, logs, APIs, and
databases
• Standardize encodings and columns
LESSON ONE ETL Pipelines
• Normalize data and create dummy variables
• Handle outliers, missing values, and duplicated data
• Engineer new features by running calculations
• Build a SQLite database to store cleaned data

• Prepare text data for analysis with tokenization,

lemmatization, and removing stop words
• Use scikit-learn to transform and vectorize text data
Natural Language
LESSON TWO • Build features with bag of words and tf-idf
Processing
• Extract features with tools such as named entity
recognition and part of speech tagging
• Build an NLP model to perform sentiment analysis

• Understand the advantages of using machine learning

pipelines to streamline the data preparation and modeling
process
• Chain data transformations and an estimator with scikit-
learn’s Pipeline
Machine Learning • Use feature unions to perform steps in parallel and create
LESSON THREE
Pipelines more complex workflows
• Grid search over pipeline to optimize parameters for entire
workflow
• Complete a case study to build a full machine learning
pipeline that prepares data and creates a model for a
dataset

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Course 4: Experiment Design and
Recommendations
Learn to design experiments and analyze A/B test results. Explore approaches for building
recommendation systems.

Course Project IBM has an online data science community where members can post
tutorials, notebooks, articles, and datasets. In this project, you will
Design a
build a recommendation engine, based on user behavior and social
Recommendation Engine network in IBM Watson Studio’s data platform, to surface content
with IBM most likely to be relevant to a user.

LEARNING OUTCOMES

• Understand how to set up an experiment, and the ideas

associated with experiments vs. observational studies
LESSON ONE Experiment Design
• Defining control and test conditions
• Choosing control and testing groups

• Applications of statistics in the real world

Statistical Concerns • Establishing key metrics
LESSON TWO
of Experimentation • SMART experiments: Specific, Measurable, Actionable,
Realistic, Timely

• How it works and its limitations

• Sources of Bias: Novelty and Recency Effects
• Multiple Comparison Techniques (FDR, Bonferroni, Tukey)
LESSON THREE A/B Testing
• Portfolio Exercise: Using a technical screener from Starbucks
to analyze the results of an experiment and write up your
findings

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 • Distinguish between common techniques for creating
recommendation engines including knowledge based,
Introduction to content based, and collaborative filtering based methods.
LESSON FOUR Recommendation • Implement each of these techniques in python.
Engines • List business goals associated with recommendation engines,
and be able to recognize which of these goals are most easily
met with existing recommendation techniques.

• Understand the pitfalls of traditional methods and pitfalls of

measuring the influence of recommendation engines under
traditional regression and classification techniques.
• Create recommendation engines using matrix factorization
Matrix and FunkSVD
LESSON FIVE Factorization for • Interpret the results of matrix factorization to better
Recommendations understand latent features of customer data
• Determine common pitfalls of recommendation engines like
the cold start problem and difficulties associated with usual
tactics for assessing the effectiveness of recommendation
engines using usual techniques, and potential solutions.

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Course 5: Data Science Projects
Leverage what you’ve learned throughout the program to build your own open-ended Data Science project.
This project will serve as a demonstration of your valuable abilities as a Data Scientist.

In this capstone project, you will leverage what you’ve learned

throughout the program to build a data science project of your
Course Project choosing. You will define the problem you want to solve, identify
and explore the data, then perform your analyses and develop a set
Data Science Capstone of conclusions. You will present the analysis and your conclusions
Project in a blog post and GitHub repository. This project will serve as a
demonstration of your ability as a data scientist, and will be an
important component of your job-ready portfolio.

LEARNING OUTCOMES

• Use convolutional neural networks to classify different dogs

according to their breeds
Elective 1: • Deploy your model to allow others to upload images of their
LESSON ONE Dog Breed dogs and send them back the corresponding breeds.
Classification • Complete one of the most popular projects in Udacity history,
and show the world how you can use your deep learning skills
to entertain an audience!

• Use purchasing habits to arrive at discount measures to

Elective 2: obtain and retain customers
LESSON TWO
Starbucks • Identify groups of individuals that are most likely to be
responsive to rebates.

• Work through a real-world dataset and challenge provided by

Elective 3: Arvato Arvato Financial Services, a Bertelsmann company
LESSON THREE
Financial Services • Top performers have a chance at an interview with Arvato or
another Bertelsmann company!

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 • Take a course on Apache Spark and complete a project using a
Elective 4: Spark massive, distributed dataset to predict customer churn
LESSON FOUR
for Big Data • Learn to deploy your Spark cluster on either AWS or IBM
Cloud

Elective 5: Your
LESSON FIVE • Use your skills to tackle any other project of your choice
Choice

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Our Classroom Experience
REAL-WORLD PROJECTS
Build your skills through industry-relevant projects. Get
personalized feedback from our network of 900+ project
reviewers. Our simple interface makes it easy to submit
your projects as often as you need and receive unlimited
feedback on your work.

KNOWLEDGE
Find answers to your questions with Knowledge, our
proprietary wiki. Search questions asked by other students,
connect with technical mentors, and discover in real-time
how to solve the challenges that you encounter.

STUDENT HUB
Leverage the power of community through a simple, yet
powerful chat interface built within the classroom. Use
Student Hub to connect with fellow students in your
program as you support and learn from each other.

WORKSPACES
See your code in action. Check the output and quality of
your code by running them on workspaces that are a part
of our classroom.

QUIZZES
Check your understanding of concepts learned in the
program by answering simple and auto-graded quizzes.
Easily go back to the lessons to brush up on concepts
anytime you get an answer wrong.

CUSTOM STUDY PLANS

Preschedule your study times and save them to your
personal calendar to create a custom study plan. Program
regular reminders to keep track of your progress toward
your goals and completion of your program.

PROGRESS TRACKER
Stay on track to complete your Nanodegree program with
useful milestone reminders.

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Learn with the Best

Josh Bernhard Juno Lee

DATA S C I E N T I S T DATA S C I E N C E I N S T R U C TO R
Josh has been sharing his passion for As a data scientist, Juno built a
data for nearly a decade at all levels of recommendation engine to personalize
university, and as Lead Data Science online shopping experiences, computer
Instructor at Galvanize. He’s used data vision and natural language processing
science for work ranging from cancer models to analyze product data, and tools
research to process automation. to generate insight into user behavior.

Luis Serrano Andrew Paster

I N S T R U C TO R I N S T R U C TO R
Luis was formerly a Machine Learning Andrew has an engineering degree from
Engineer at Google. He holds a PhD in Yale, and has used his data science skills to
mathematics from the University of build a jewelry business from the ground
Michigan, and a Postdoctoral Fellowship at up. He has additionally created courses
the University of Quebec at Montreal. for Udacity’s Self-Driving Car Engineer
Nanodegree program.

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Learn with the Best

Mike Yi David Drummond

DATA S C I E N T I S T VP OF ENGINEERING
Mike is a Content Developer with a David is VP of Engineering at Insight
multidisciplinary academic background, where he enjoys breaking down difficult
including math, statistics, physics, and concepts and helping others learn data
psychology. Previously, he worked on engineering. David has a PhD in Physics
Udacity’s Data Analyst Nanodegree from UC Riverside.
program as a support lead.

Judit Lantos
S E N I O R DATA E N G I N E E R

Currently, Judit is a Senior Data Engineer

at Netflix. Formerly a Data Engineer at
Split, where she worked on the statistical
engine of their full-stack experimentation
platform, she has also been an instructor
at Insight Data Science, helping software
engineers and academic coders transition
to DE roles.

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All Our Nanodegree Programs Include:

EXPERIENCED PROJECT REVIEWERS

REVIEWER SERVICES

• Personalized feedback & line by line code reviews

• 1600+ Reviewers with a 4.85/5 average rating
• 3 hour average project review turnaround time
• Unlimited submissions and feedback loops
• Practical tips and industry best practices
• Additional suggested resources to improve

TECHNICAL MENTOR SUPPORT

MENTORSHIP SERVICES

• Questions answered quickly by our team of

technical mentors
• 1000+ Mentors with a 4.7/5 average rating
• Support for all your technical questions

PERSONAL CAREER SERVICES

C AREER SUPPORT

• Resume support
• Github portfolio review
• LinkedIn profile optimization

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Frequently Asked Questions
PROGR AM OVERVIE W

WHY SHOULD I ENROLL?

The data science field is expected to continue growing rapidly over the next
several years, and there’s huge demand for data scientists across industries.
Data scientist is consistently rated as a top career.

Udacity has collaborated with industry leaders to offer a world-class learning

experience so you can advance your data science career. You’ll get hands-
on experience running data pipelines, designing experiments, building
recommendation systems, and more. You’ll have personalized support as
you master in-demand skills that qualify you for high-value jobs in the data
science field.

By the end of the program, you’ll have an impressive portfolio of real-world

projects, and valuable hands-on experience. You’ll also receive career support
via profile and portfolios reviews to help make sure you’re ready to establish a
successful data science career, and land a job you love.

WHAT JOBS WILL THIS PROGRAM PREPARE ME FOR?

Obtaining the skills required to be a Data Scientist will make you extremely
valuable across many industries, and in many roles. Data Scientists work as
Analysts, Statisticians, Engineers, and more. Some become Data and Analytics
Managers, while others specialize as Database Administrators. As a graduate
of this program, you’ll be prepared to seek out roles that run the gamut from
generalist to specialist, and all points in between.

HOW DO I KNOW IF THIS PROGRAM IS RIGHT FOR ME?

This program offers an ideal path for experienced programmers and
data analysts to advance their data science careers. If you’re interested in
deepening your expertise in the fields of analytics, machine learning, data
engineering, and/or data science, this is a great way to get hands on practice
with a variety of techniques and learn to build end to end data science
solutions.

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE DATA ANALYST, MACHINE

LEARNING ENGINEER, AND THE DATA SCIENTIST NANODEGREE
PROGRAMS?
The Data Analyst program is designed for people with some data analysis
experience and little-to-no programming experience. Students will learn to
analyze data using Python and SQL, to wrangle and clean messy data, to
use applied statistics to test hypotheses, and to create data visualizations.
Graduates of this program will be prepared for data analyst positions.

The Data Scientist Nanodegree program is designed for students with strong
programming and data analysis skills, as it is the next step for graduates of

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FAQs Continued
the Data Analyst Nanodegree program. Students will learn to build machine
learning models, run data pipelines, design experiments and recommendation
engines, communicate effectively, and to deploy data applications. Graduates
of this program will be prepared for data scientist positions.

The Machine Learning Engineer Nanodegree program prepares students for

machine learning engineering careers. As both data scientist and machine
learning jobs require machine learning knowledge, each of these two
programs begins with a focus on machine learning. The curriculum diverges
in later sections as you begin to focus on more job-specific tools, skills, and
techniques.

ENROLLMENT AND ADMISSION

DO I NEED TO APPLY? WHAT ARE THE ADMISSION CRITERIA?

No. This Nanodegree program accepts all applicants regardless of experience
and specific background.

WHAT ARE THE PREREQUISITES FOR ENROLLMENT?

The Data Scientist Nanodegree program is designed for students with
programming and data analysis experience. Students should have a high
comfort level with a variety of topics before starting the program. In order
to successfully complete this program, you should meet the following
prerequisites:

• Python programming, including common data analysis libraries (NumPy,

pandas, Matplotlib).
• SQL programming
• Statistics (Descriptive and Inferential)
• Calculus
• Linear Algebra
• Experience wrangling and visualizing data

IF I DO NOT MEET THE REQUIREMENTS TO ENROLL, WHAT SHOULD I DO?

Udacity’s Data Analyst Nanodegree program is great preparation for the Data
Scientist Nanodegree program. You’ll learn programming with Python and
SQL, applied statistics, data wrangling, and data visualization.

You can also prepare by taking a number of Udacity’s free courses, such as:

• Introduction to Data Science

• Introduction to Python
• SQL for Data Analysis
• Statistics
• Linear Algebra

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FAQs Continued
• Data Visualization with Tableau

TUITION AND TERM OF PROGR AM

HOW IS THIS NANODEGREE PROGRAM STRUCTURED?

The Data Scientist Nanodegree program is comprised of content and
curriculum to support four (4) projects. We estimate that students can
complete the program in four (4) months working 10 hours per week.

Each project will be reviewed by the Udacity reviewer network. Feedback will
be provided and if you do not pass the project, you will be asked to resubmit
the project until it passes.

HOW LONG IS THIS NANODEGREE PROGRAM?

Access to this Nanodegree program runs for the length of time specified in
the payment card above. If you do not graduate within that time period, you
will continue learning with month to month payments. See the Terms of Use
and FAQs for other policies regarding the terms of access to our Nanodegree
programs.

SOF T WARE AND HARDWARE

WHAT SOFTWARE AND VERSIONS WILL I NEED IN THIS PROGRAM?

To successfully complete this Nanodegree program, you’ll need to be able to
download and run Python 3.7.

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