On Tuesday 3rd of October, the Inspiring Women Team held their fourth session at WeWork Waterhouse Square, the second of our practical sessions entitled ‘Let’s Understand Our Data’. This time we would be focusing on the Data Understanding step of the CRISP-DM Data Science Lifecycle, the natural progression from where we last left off.
Laura introduced the session as usual then moved straight onto talking about the skills required to become a Data Scientist. She described what the Data Understanding step of the CRISP-DM Model consists of – namely Data Collection, Description, Exploration and Verification. She explained that the practical part of the session would be to collect initial data from a source online, then to use R and Python packages to create a Description Report, Data Exploration Report and Data Quality Report.
Before our members could jump in, Darshna and Bianca both delivered 5 minute presentations on both R and Python respectively, so everyone could decide which language and packages they would like to use for the task. After this, the Inspiring Women were ready to start work on their data sets.
It was really great to see so many women of varying levels of skill and experience communicating with each other and helping each other out during the practical session. A couple of women who already had experience with creating the reports took a mentor role and helped out some off the less experienced members, which was really helpful for everyone with improving their understanding.
To finish off, we discussed our findings and any difficulties we’d come across, then Laura showed the group the ‘Data Understanding Template’ that she uses on a day-to-day basis. The session ended with our traditional networking and prosecco. Overall the practical session was a great success, and we had some lovely feedback from our members. We can’t wait for the next one!