Building on momentum in the computing community for more undergraduate experiential and interdisciplinary learning opportunities, our report details a novel approach to teaching data science in an archaeological field school study abroad context. Our structure included group and individual learning, and the flexible course design facilitated students' pursuit of their own interests via projects developed in partnership with domain experts. We provide reflections on the effectiveness of carrying out this flexible course design in the context of an interdisciplinary, domain-centered, data science course. This report also provides our reflections on the effectiveness of centering archaeological problems and using computational tools to teach responsible data practices emphasizing data collection, classification, analysis, visualization, translation, and storytelling. Finally, we explore some of the learning outcomes students demonstrated in their projects and their course reflections.

In this paper, the DSAA 2018 special session "Opportunities and Risks for Data Science in Organizations: Banking, Finance, and Policy" is presented. This session is focused on discussing how banking and finance organizations can benefit from the huge amount of data they own and continue to gather. Moreover, the session aims at identifying and exploring the challenges of applying data science to financial policy questions. It is also planned to promote a special issue of the ACM Journal of Data and Information Quality on the workshop topics.

Blocking is a technique commonly used in manual statistical analysis to account for confounding variables. However, blocking is not currently used in automated learning algorithms. These algorithms rely solely on statistical conditioning as an operator to identify conditional independence. In this work, we present relational blocking as a new operator that can be used for learning the structure of causal models. We describe how blocking is enabled by relational data sets, where blocks are determined by the links in the network. By blocking on entities rather than conditioning on variables, relational blocking can account for both measured and unobserved variables. We explain the mechanism of these methods using graphical models and the semantics of d-separation. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of relational blocking for use in causal discovery by showing how blocking can be used in the causal analysis of two real-world social media systems.

The ability to discover low-cost paths in networks has practical consequences for knowledge discovery and social network analysis tasks. Many analytic techniques for networks require finding low-cost paths, but exact methods for search become prohibitive for large networks, and data sets are steadily increasing in size. Short paths can be found efficiently by utilizing an index of network structure, which estimates network distances and enables rapid discovery of short paths. Through experiments on synthetic networks, we demonstrate that one such novel network structure index based on the shortest-path tree outperforms other previously proposed indices. We also show that it generalizes across arbitrarily weighted networks of various structures and densities, provides accurate estimates of distance, and has efficient time and space complexity. We present results on real data sets for several applications, including navigation, diameter estimation, centrality computation, and clustering---all made efficient by virtue of the network structure index.

Testing for marginal and conditional independence is a common task in machine learning and knowledge discovery applications. Prior work has demonstrated that conventional independence tests suffer from dramatically increased rates of Type I errors when naively applied to relational data. We use graphical models to specify the conditions under which these errors occur, and use those models to devise novel and accurate conditional independence tests.

Graph clustering has become ubiquitous in the study of relational data sets. We examine two simple algorithms: a new graphical adaptation of the k-medoids algorithm and the Girvan-Newman method based on edge betweenness centrality. We show that they can be effective at discovering the latent groups or communities that are defined by the link structure of a graph. However, both approaches rely on prohibitively expensive computations, given the size of modern relational data sets. Network structure indices (NSIs) are a proven technique for indexing network structure and efficiently finding short paths. We show how incorporating NSIs into these graph clustering algorithms can overcome these complexity limitations. We also present promising quantitative and qualitative evaluations of the modified algorithms on synthetic and real data sets.

Statistics on networks have become vital to the study of relational data drawn from areas such as bibliometrics, fraud detection, bioinformatics, and the Internet. Calculating many of the most important measures - such as betweenness centrality, closeness centrality, and graph diameter-requires identifying short paths in these networks. However, finding these short paths can be intractable for even moderate-size networks. We introduce the concept of a network structure index (NSI), a composition of (1) a set of annotations on every node in the network and (2) a function that uses the annotations to estimate graph distance between pairs of nodes. We present several varieties of NSIs, examine their time and space complexity, and analyze their performance on synthetic and real data sets. We show that creating an NSI for a given network enables extremely efficient and accurate estimation of a wide variety of network statistics on that network.

Recent proposals to apply data mining systems to problems in law enforcement, national security, and fraud detection have attracted both media attention and technical critiques of their expected accuracy and impact on privacy. Unfortunately, the majority of technical critiques have been based on simplistic assumptions about data, classifiers, inference procedures, and the overall architecture of such systems. We consider these critiques in detail, and we construct a simulation model that more closely matches realistic systems. We show how both the accuracy and privacy impact of a hypothetical system could be substantially improved, and we discuss the necessary and sufficient conditions for this improvement to be achieved. This analysis is neither a defense nor a critique of any particular system concept. Rather, our model suggests alternative technical designs that could mitigate some concerns, but also raises more specific conditions that must be met for such systems to be both accurate and socially desirable.