Analysis of Big Data in Physics

Full course description

As the world is digitizing, data is being generated by the terabytes per second. As such, there is a great need for people who can make sense of all these data and extract meaningful conclusions. In physics, the last 20 years has seen movement away from individuals working in research groups, towards large, international collaborations. Within these collaborations, data gathering and handling are essential for the successful completion of the experiments. Typical examples are through telescope observations, gravitational wave detectors or particle accelerators.

This skill is a general introduction to analysis of data from large physics experiments. We will learn the systematic treatment of data - following logic and statistics - to reach answers to our questions and assess their significance. We will change datasets (and teachers) every week, which will consist of LIGO/Virgo data, CERN/LHCb data, astrophysical datasets and open machine learning datasets. This skill will introduce modern computing  skills for data handling using open-source software packages and github. We will make use of Jupyter notebooks running on a server at MSP, for which you just need to bring your laptop with a browser. The first week will cover an introduction to the python programming language.

At the end of the skill we hope to have provided you with a diversity of perspectives on data within physics as well as the skill to interpret and analyse such data.