This course is intended to be the first course in Graduate Certificate in Data Analysis for Complex Systems (DACS). Some students may take in in parallel with CCCS 620 or even CCCS 630, which is fine. To make the most of the combination of those three courses that are all mandatory in DACS, it is best to either follow the sequence in increasing numerical order or by taking the courses simultaneously. We chose not to force a pre-requisite sequence so that students from diverse backgrounds can tailor the experience in a flexible manner, but we do strongly recommend the proposed order of this course being the first, CCCS 620 the second, and CCCS 630 the third, should a student prefer to study one course at a time.
However, if you already took 620 or 630 before this one, you should not get bored by any means. Just please be understanding with your classmates who may not yet have had exposure to all the tools and concepts that you encountered in the other courses. It may overwhelm those new to the field if we go into details of how things are connected when they are yet to encounter many of the things being discussed; hence it might be best to hold in-depth conversations that mix and match this content with that of the other courses as asynchronous discussions with the instructor and those students who are up for the challenge instead of taking the risk of confusingh a classmate during the weekly live-class sessions.