CSE 519 - Data Science

Fall 2026

Data Science is a rapidly emerging discipline at the intersection of statistics, machine learning, data visualization, and mathematical modeling. This course is designed to provide a hands-on introduction to Data Science by challenging student groups to build predictive models for upcoming events, and validating their models against the actual outcomes.

  • Course Time: 11:00AM-12:20PM Tuesday and Thursday
    Place: 145 Engineering Hall
  • Steven Skiena's office hours are 12:30PM-2:00PM Tuesday-Thursday, and by appointment.
  • The course teaching assistants will be:
  • Videos and slides from my Fall 2020 lectures is available here. The best stuff should always be available at www.data-manual.com.
  • Sign up for the Piazza class discussion board at https://piazza.com/stonybrook/fall2026/cse519.
  • Syllabus
  • Lecture Schedule
  • In 2014, I ran the course as a reality TV show where each group was given a distint predictive modeling challenge, and documented these on course videos available from www.quant-shop.com and the Quant Shop Vimeo channel. I think they are interesting to watch as evidence of how a data science project unfolds.

Textbook

We will use my book The Data Science Design Manual, We will use my book The Data Science Design Manual, We will use my book The Data Science Design Manual, We will use my book The Data Science Design Manual, Springer-Verlag, 2017.The associated website www.data-manual.com points to many resources, including lecture notes/videos, errata, a problem solution Wiki, and sample Python notebooks for generating figures from the book.

I will welcome feedback on the book. Please keep track of errata in the book send them to me, ideally in one batch at the end of the semester.

Homework Assignments

Lecture Notes

I will give about 25 formal lectures this semester. All classes will be recorded by Zoom and made available on Blackboard.

Ritika Nevatia made lecture notes she took in class one year available to all interested students. You may check them out if you wish.

Old lecture notes are available from the previous offering in Fall 2014.

Short Course on Computational Social Science

I taught a minicourse on machine learning and NLP for social scientists at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, Italy in November 2022. This course was largely (but not completely) based on my slides from CSE 519. I give my lecture slides from this course below.

Short Course on Word and Graph Embeddings

I taught a minicourse on Word and Graph Embeddings at BigDat 2023 on Gran Canary in Spain's Canary Islands. I give the links to my lecture videos and slides below.