Course information
Department
Length
1 year full-time; 2 years part-time; distance learning
Course overview
Goldsmiths works in partnership with the University of London Worldwide on a distance learning version of this programme. Find out more on the University of London course page.
Goldsmiths' operating principles for 2022-23 have not yet been finalised but should changes be required to teaching in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, we will publish these as early as possible for prospective students wishing to start their programme in September 2022.
The MSc Data Science will provide you with the technical and practical skills to analyse the big data that is the key to success in future business, digital media and science.
The rate at which we are able to create data is rapidly accelerating. According to IBM, globally, we currently produce over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data a day. This ranges from biomedical data to social media activity and climate monitoring to retail transactions. These enormous quantities of data hold the keys to success across many domains from business and marketing to treating cancer or mitigating climate change.
The pace at which we produce data is rapidly outstripping our ability to analyse and use it. Science and industry are crying out for a new generation of data scientists who combine the statistical skills of data analysis and the computational skills needed to carry out this analysis on a vast scale.
The MSc Data Science provides you with these skills.
Studying this Masters, you will learn the mathematical foundations of statistics, data mining and machine learning, and apply these to practical, real-world data.
As well as these statistical skills, you will learn the computational techniques needed to efficiently analyse very large data sets. You will apply these skills to a range of real-world data, under the guidance of experts in that domain. You will analyse trends in social media, make financial predictions and extract musical information from audio files.
The degree will culminate in a final project in which you can apply your skills and follow your specialist interests. You will do a novel analysis of real-world data of your choice.
The programme includes:
- A firm grounding in the theory of data mining, statistics and machine learning
- Hands-on practical real-world applications such as social media, biomedical data and financial data with Hadoop (used by Yahoo!, Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, IBM, Amazon, and many others), R and other specialised software
- The opportunity to work with real-world software such as Apache
Talks
We have close links with industry and regularly invite leading professionals to deliver lectures and talks on Data Science.
Staff
Contact the department
If you have specific questions about the degree, contact Dr Larisa Soldatova.