Full course description
This course will provide you with an opportunity to sharpen and hone your calculus skills before beginning your Data Science journey at Notre Dame. You may wonder where exactly in the program you'll be using these skills. Well, the short answer is that you'll be using them in all of your data science courses! But depending on the course, you may not be utilizing certain skills or you may only be using a certain level of a skill rather than something more intricate or detailed.
However, there are certainly courses where your calculus knowledge will be much more helpful to your success. We've outlined the below courses as places where you may find that your calculus knowledge will be important to have.
In your first semester, in Probability and Statistics, you'll explore derivatives of polynomials and polynomial functions, along with delving into logarithms, u-substitution, and how limits work in relation to consistency.
In your second semester, you'll need to do single-variable differentiation in Linear Models and you'll explore gradient descent and the partial derivative of a function in Introduction to Machine Learning.
And in your fourth semester, you'll need to make sure that you've mastered the concepts and topics from Probability and Statistics so that you'll understand the mechanics of how models are optimized and trained in Advanced Machine Learning.
This course was designed to ensure that you have all the right calculus skills that you'll need to be successful in the Online Master's in Data Science program. To that end, the course will be split up into five distinct areas of study. Our hopes for this course is that you'll be able to successfully do the following by the end of your time in the course.
- Evaluate limits of functions graphically, numerically, and algebraically;
- Determine derivatives of functions using appropriate techniques;
- Use derivatives to solve real-world problems involving rates of change and optimization;
- Find antiderivatives using appropriate techniques;
- Use integration to solve real-world problems involving accumulation and area; and
- Find partial derivatives and use them to solve optimization problems.