Data Analytics for Sense-Making

Author

Vik Gopal, Lim Tiong Wee

Published

October 1, 2025

Preface

IND5003 is a foundation course for students in a Master’s program for working adults, at the National University of Singapore. The title of the course is

Data Analytics for Sense-Making

The content of the course aims to bring students up to speed in a variety of analytic techniques that will be useful for them in later courses of the program. You can read some reviews of the course on NUSmods.

In designing this course, we tried to cover the techniques from a couple of different angles:

  • From the viewpoint of the types of data encountered, e.g. time series, unstructured text data, image data, and so on.
  • From the viewpoint of the types of questions that could be asked of the data, e.g. are we attempting to plan for unseen scenarios (simulation), are we interrogating the data for hidden structure (unsupervised learning), and so on.

The entire course uses the Python programming language. By the end of the course, the aim was for students to become familiar with Python for data analysis.

If you are a fellow instructor and you find something useful in this textbook, please do let me know at vik.gopal@nus.edu.sg. If you need more details about anything, do feel free to write as well.

So long, and thanks for reading!

Vik

https://blog.nus.edu.sg/stavg