In this course, you will learn to think like a data scientist and ask questions of your data. You will use interactive features in MATLAB to extract subsets of data and to compute statistics on groups of related data. You will learn to use MATLAB to automatically generate code so you can learn syntax as you explore. You will also use interactive documents, called live scripts, to capture the steps of your analysis, communicate the results, and provide interactive controls allowing others to experiment by selecting groups of data.

These skills are valuable for those who have domain knowledge and some exposure to computational tools, but no programming background is required. To be successful in this course, you should have some knowledge of basic statistics (e.g., histograms, averages, standard deviation, curve fitting, interpolation). By the end of this course, you will be able to load data into MATLAB, prepare it for analysis, visualize it, perform basic computations, and communicate your results to others. In your last assignment, you will combine these skills to assess damages following a severe weather event and communicate a polished recommendation based on your analysis of the data. You will be able to visualize the location of these events on a geographic map and create sliding controls allowing you to quickly visualize how a phenomenon changes over time.