Welcome to the Neural Data Science Course!
This video introduces the course, Neural Data Science, as well as the free online resources, including the associated textbook and downloadable Jupyter notebooks so you can follow along with the lessons.
This book will teach you the fundamentals of Python, and how to use the GitHub Copilot AI assistant to help you learn to code, and write code for you. From there, we learn additional Python in the context of using it for data science, including data visualization, and working with different types of neuroscience data, including single unit recordings, EEG, and fMRI.
Most areas of neuroscience research and development rely on increasingly large and complex data sets. Discovery and application in neuroscience thus relies on the ability to manage these large data sets, and extract meaning from them. In other words, neuroscience now relies heavily on data science, which has been variously defined as “…an umbrella term to describe the entire complex and multistep processes used to extract value from data.” (Wing, 2019) and the ability to “bring structure to large quantities of formless data and make analysis possible” (Davenport & Patil, 2012, p.73).
In neuroscience, data science is an increasingly necessary skill. Data from techniques like single-cell recordings, local field potentials, EEG, and fMRI is complex and multidimensional. Being able to understand, manipulate, and visualize the structure of these complex datasets is a necessary skill for performing the research. On top of this, it is increasingly clear that very large data sets - often built collaboratively by many labs - are required to make reliable inferences about neuroscientific processes. Making inferences also depends on computational models - ways of identifying and representing patterns in the data. While some of these will be familiar from statistics class, a wide range of statistical and machine learning models are now widely used in neuroscience.
Textbook: https://neuraldatascience.io
GitHub home (downloadable materials): https://github.com/neural-data-science