Real-world data sets are messy and complicated. Written for students in social science and public management, this authoritative but approachable guide describes all the tools needed to collect data and prepare it for analysis. Offering detailed, step-by-step instructions, it covers collection of many different types of data including web files, APIs, and maps; data cleaning; data formatting; the integration of different sources into a comprehensive data set; and storage using third-party tools to facilitate access and shareability, from Google Docs to GitHub. Assuming no prior knowledge of R and Python, the author introduces programming concepts gradually, using real data sets that provide the reader with practical, functional experience.

This comprehensive guide provides a step-by-step approach to data collection, cleaning, formatting, and storage, using Python and R.

"Data analysis has become a necessary skill across the social sciences, and recent advancements in computing power have made knowledge of programming an essential component. Yet most data science books are intimidating and overwhelming to a non-specialist audience, including most undergraduates. This book will be a shorter, more focused and accessible version of Kosuke Imai's Quantitative Social Science book, which was published by Princeton in 2018 and has been adopted widely in graduate level courses of the same title. This book uses the same innovative approach as Quantitative Social Science , using real data and 'R' to answer a wide range of social science questions. It assumes no prior knowledge of statistics or coding. It starts with straightforward, simple data analysis and culminates with multivariate linear regression models, focusing more on the intuition of how the math works rather than the math itself. The book makes extensive use of data visualizations, diagrams, pictures, cartoons, etc., to help students understand and recall complex concepts, provides an easy to follow, step-by-step template of how to conduct data analysis from beginning to end, and will be accompanied by supplemental materials in the appendix and online for both students and instructors"--

"Princeton University Press published Imai's textbook, Quantitative Social Science: An Introduction, an introduction to quantitative methods and data science for upper level undergrads and graduates in professional programs, in February 2017. What is distinct about the book is how it leads students through a series of applied examples of statistical methods, drawing on real examples from social science research. The original book was prepared with the statistical software R, which is freely available online and has gained in popularity in recent years. But many existing courses in statistics and data sciences, particularly in some subject areas like sociology and law, use STATA, another general purpose package that has been the market leader since the 1980s. We've had several requests for STATA versions of the text as many programs use it by default. This is a "translation" of the original text, keeping all the current pedagogical text but inserting the necessary code and outputs from STATA in their place"--

This textbook presents the essential tools and core concepts of data science to public officials, policy analysts, and economists among others in order to further their application in the public sector. An expansion of the quantitative economics frameworks presented in policy and business schools, this book emphasizes the process of asking relevant questions to inform public policy. Its techniques and approaches emphasize data-driven practices, beginning with the basic programming paradigms that occupy the majority of an analyst’s time and advancing to the practical applications of statistical learning and machine learning. The text considers two divergent, competing perspectives to support its applications, incorporating techniques from both causal inference and prediction. Additionally, the book includes open-sourced data as well as live code, written in R and presented in notebook form, which readers can use and modify to practice working with data.

Both Traditional Students and Working Professionals Acquire the Skills to Analyze Social Problems. Big Data and Social Science: A Practical Guide to Methods and Tools shows how to apply data science to real-world problems in both research and the practice. The book provides practical guidance on combining methods and tools from computer science, statistics, and social science. This concrete approach is illustrated throughout using an important national problem, the quantitative study of innovation. The text draws on the expertise of prominent leaders in statistics, the social sciences, data science, and computer science to teach students how to use modern social science research principles as well as the best analytical and computational tools. It uses a real-world challenge to introduce how these tools are used to identify and capture appropriate data, apply data science models and tools to that data, and recognize and respond to data errors and limitations. For more information, including sample chapters and news, please visit the author's website.

This accessible and classroom-tested textbook/reference presents an introduction to the fundamentals of the emerging and interdisciplinary field of data science. The coverage spans key concepts adopted from statistics and machine learning, useful techniques for graph analysis and parallel programming, and the practical application of data science for such tasks as building recommender systems or performing sentiment analysis. Topics and features: provides numerous practical case studies using real-world data throughout the book; supports understanding through hands-on experience of solving data science problems using Python; describes techniques and tools for statistical analysis, machine learning, graph analysis, and parallel programming; reviews a range of applications of data science, including recommender systems and sentiment analysis of text data; provides supplementary code resources and data at an associated website.