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Courses and Projects during my Master’s in Data Science

Following is a list of courses and projects/skills I gained during my Master’s in Data Science.

Course NameLearning/Project/Skills
MSSC 5650
Theory of Optimization
In this course I learned intermediate and advanced topics in unconstrained optimization. This course inspired the following two blogs Prerequisites for Convex Optimization 1 and Prerequisites for Convex Optimization 2.
COSC 6330
Advanced Machine Learning
This course focused on machine learning algorithms with an emphasis on mathematical rigor. For example, in this course I learned Mercer’s theorem, reproducing kernel Hilbert space, etc which are needed to understand SVM. The project I did as a part of this course was later published in MLSP 2023.
MSSC 6040
Applied Linear Algebra
This course refined my understanding of linear algebra and inspired me to create the Linear Algebra blog.
MSSC 5790
Bayesian Statistics
This was an introductory course in Bayesian stats and it helped to include some advanced distributions to my blog.
COSC 6520
Data Analytics
I was introduced to R programming language in this course in addition to statistical machine learning topics.
MSSC 6250
Statistical Machine Learning
Checkout my final project write-up “Explainability of Machine Learning Models using Co-operative Game Theory” and the Github repo.
COSC 6820
Data Ethics
Checkout my final project write-up “Generative AI: Ethical Challenges and Prevention Strategies with Watermarking and Traceability” for this course.
COSC 5500
Visual Analytics
I learned how to make dashboards with tools like Tableau. Check out my Tableau Dashboard where I visual crime data and Airbnb listing in the Chicago area. As a final project, I used Rshiny to create an interactive app, see the GitHub repo for that. This application allows Airbnb guests to look up crime rates near an Airbnb listing and provides different filters like time range and category of crimes for more granular controls.

Coursera Certifications

As I come from an EECE background, I had no formal exposure to deep learning/machine learning/data science in my undergrad. I taught myself these topics by completing certification courses offered through Coursera. See below a list of certifications I got during undergrad:

TitleCertificate
Computer Vision Basics[Link]
Data Science Math Skills[Link]
Managing Machine Learning Projects with Google Cloud[Link]
Understanding and Visualizing Data with Python[Link]
Inferential Statistical Analysis with Python[Link]
Deep Learning Specializaton (includes 5 courses)[Link]