Webinar for Researchers: Basic Python

This workshop, consists of five online sessions, aims at helping participants to build a solid foundation in Python programming. Application of Python’s libraries in data manipulation and data acquisition, storage and visualization will be covered. This workshop is also a good preparation for participants who interest in advance machine learning.

Date: 18 May (Tue), 20 May (Thu), 25 May (Tue), 27 May (Thu), 1 Jun (Tue)

Time: 14:30 – 17:00

Pre-requisite: Basic programming concepts

Target Audience: Rpg, Tpg, Ug Students

Medium of Instruction: English

Course Outline:

(18 May) Lesson 1

1. Introduction to Jupyter IDE
   • Magic commands
   • Useful shortcuts
2. Introduction to Python
   • Expressions
   • Data types
   • Arithmetic operations
   • Control flows

(20 May) Lesson 2

1. More about Python
   • Functions
   • String operations
   • Containers (list, tuple, set, dictionary)
   • Introduction to encoding
   • Manipulating dates and times (the datetime module)

(25 May) Lesson 3

1. Python libraries for numerical computations and data analysis
   • NumPy
     • Indexing
     • Arithmetic operations
     • Concatenations
     • Aggregations
     • Sorting
   • Pandas
     • Operations on data columns
     • Handling missing values
     • Pivot tables
     • Working with text and time series
     • File management

(27 May) Lesson 4

1. More about Python string: Regular Expression
   • Metacharacter
   • Quantifier
   • Group
2. Web scraping
3. Database management with Python
   • MySQL, MongoDB
     • Construct database and table/collection
     • Query data from table/collection
     • Insert, update and delete records/documents

(1 June) Lesson 5

1. Visualization with Python libraries
   • Matplotlib
     • Formatting axes, titles, labels, annotations and color bar
     • Plotting line, bar, scatter, histogram, boxplot, 3d plot
   • A higher-level approach: Seaborn
     • Plotting heatmap, violin plot, join plot