New Data Science Certificate

The Department of Statistics will offer a new data science certificate, in partnership with the Department of Computer Science, in the fall of 2016.

The certificate is the first graduate-level educational partnership between these two well-known departments and was created for students interested in the interface between statistics and computer science.

Data science is an interdisciplinary field. Practitioners need to be skilled in computing, storing data and accessing data — the computer science part of data science — and skilled in inference about the data, the statistics part of data science. Four courses are required to obtain the certificate and at least one course is required from each department. These courses are taught by faculty members and include topics such as statistical learning and data mining, statistical reasoning with big data, applied Bayesian and database structures.

The data science field is growing and data scientists wear the hats of both statisticians and computer scientists. Statistics is excited to partner with the Department of Computer Science to respond to this need and looks forward to additional offerings in the future.