When we imagine the work of a data analyst, we often picture meaningful data analysis and beautiful data visualizations. Although that is an exciting part of the job, data analysts actually spend the majority of their time acquiring, cleaning, and preparing data for analysis. This teaching case guides students through some of the most common data…

While many instructors are aware of the "Literary Digest" 1936 poll as an example of biased sampling methods, this article details potential further explorations for the "Digest's" 1924-1936 quadrennial U.S. presidential election polls. Potential activities range from lessons in data acquisition, cleaning, and validation, to…

Support vector classifiers are one of the most popular linear classification techniques for binary classification. Different from some commonly seen model fitting criteria in statistics, such as the ordinary least squares criterion and the maximum likelihood method, its algorithm depends on an optimization problem under constraints, which is…