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Data Analytics and Visualization

RE 519, Runstad Department of Real Estate, University of Washington, Autumn 2025
Monday & Wednesday, 2:30 - 3:50pm, Mechanical Engineering Building 245
Haoyu Yue (Pre-doctoral Instructor), [email protected], Schedule Office Hours


Real estate decision-making requires the assessment of interdisciplinary datasets, which include socioeconomic, financial, and environmental data. Determining evolving patterns, analyzing and visualizing them, is critical in holistically assessing an area and a real estate decision to be made. This course aims to provide you with an opportunity to improve your coding ability and demonstrate that using R is more replicable and efficient than Excel.

We will work in groups to solve tricky data analytics & visualization problems. Of course, we will encounter a lot of new commands and new ways of thinking about how data is organized. However, we will most importantly learn how to understand the process of data analysis and how to best inform our audience and honestly describe the underlying data. The course is developed based on materials from Dr. Feiyang Sun at UC San Diego, Siman Ning, and Christian Phillips.


September 22, 2025

All announcements →

Welcome to the Class RE 519

Welcome to RE 519 Data Analytics and Visualization in Autumn 2025. We are looking forward to meeting you in person on our first day of class (Wednesday, September 24, 2025). The course website will be the main place for all course information and materials. We will use Canvas as a place for submitting assignments and for grading purposes. Ed Discussion will be used for announcements, discussion, and technical questions.

Before the first class on Wednesday, September 24, 2025, please:

  1. Finish the pre-class survey.
  2. Look through the readings for this class on the course website.
  3. Look through the Lab 1 Part A and try to install R and RStudio in advance. No worries if you encounter any trouble, we will install them in the first class.
  4. Bring your laptop, no matter whether Windows, Mac, or Linux, to each class!

Schedules

Go to the recent section. This schedule is subject to change, and please check back regularly for updates. All readings and materials can be directly accessed via the links below, although some may require a UW NetID login. Some readings and links about R/coding are on each lab session page.

I - Introduction to Data Science and R

Sep 24
Overview and the Values of Data Science
Slides / Pre-class Survey
LAB 1-A Setup
Page / Rmd
OptionalData Science and its Relationship to Big Data and Data-driven Decision Making. Foster Provost and Tom Fawcett. 2013.
OptionalGetting ahead of the Market: How Big Data is Transforming Real Estate. McKinsey & Company. 2018.
Sep 29
Data in Real Estate
LAB 1-B Basic of R/RStudio and Markdown
REQUIREDChapter 1-2, Real Estate Analysis in the Information Age. Kimberly Winson-Geideman, et al. 2018.
OptionalChapter 1-3, Seeing Theory - A Visual Introduction to Probability and Statistics. Daniel Kunin.
OptionalChapter 5: Market, Place, Interface, All Data Are Local: Thinking Critically in a Data-Driven Society. Yanni Alexander Loukissas. 2019.
OptionalCensus Data for People and Housing. Yanni Christopher C. Brown. 2020.
Oct 01
Data Science Workflows and Components
LAB 1-C Dataframes and Accessing Census Data
REQUIREDChapter 3-4, Real Estate Analysis in the Information Age. Kimberly Winson-Geideman, et al. 2018.
Oct 06
Data Science for Real Estate at Macro- and Micro-level
LAB 2-A Modifying Dataframes
Page / Rmd
LAB 1 DUE 11:59 PM
Oct 08
Policy and Data-Driven Decision
LAB 2-B Summarizing and Joining Dataframes
RequiredFinding Common Ground: Best Practices for State Policies Supporting Transit-Oriented Development. Mason A. Virant, et al. 2024.
OptionalUrban Big Data: City Management and Real Estate Markets. Richard Barkham, et al. 2022.
Team Formation Due
Project Team Formation Instruction

II - Data Visualization

Oct 13
Data Visual Design
LAB 3-A Tidy Data and GitHub
LAB 2 DUE 11:59 PM

OptionalData Viz Project by ferdio.
OptionalDesign and Redesign in Data Visualization. Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas. 2015.
OptionalVisual and Statistical Thinking: Displays of Evidence for Making Decisions. Edward Tufte. 1997.
OptionalPreface & Chapter 1, Data Visualization. Kieran Healy. 2019.

Oct 15
Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA)
LAB 3-B Basic EDA in R
OptionalExploratory Data Analysis. United States Environmental Protection Agency.
Oct 20
Visualization Perception
LAB 4 Visualization using R and ggplot2
LAB 3 DUE 11:59 PM
Oct 22
No Class
Instructor leave due to ACSP Annual Conference 2025
Oct 27
Geospatial Data Science
LAB 5-A Geospatial Data and Visualization in R
LAB 4 DUE 11:59 PM
Oct 29
Interactive Visualization
LAB 5-B shiny: Interative Visualization using R
Nov 03
Introduction to Tableau
LAB 6-A Tableau - I
LAB 5 DUE 11:59 PM
Nov 05
Dashboard in Tableau
LAB 6-B Tableau - II

III - Data Modeling

Nov 10
Correlation and Linear Regression
LAB 7-A
LAB 6 DUE 11:59 PM

OptionalChapter 4-6, Seeing Theory - A Visual Introduction to Probability and Statistics. Daniel Kunin.
OptionalStatistical Modeling: The Two Cultures. Leo Breiman. 2001.

Nov 12
Logistic and Multiple Linear Regression
LAB 7-BCoding
Project Proposal Due 11:59 PM
Project Proposal Instruction
Nov 17
Spatiotemporal Data Analysis
LAB 8-A
LAB 7 DUE 11:59 PM
Nov 19
Intro to Supervised and Unsupervised Learning
LAB 8-B
Nov 24
Guest Speaker (TBD)
LAB 8 DUE 11:59 PM
Nov 26
Project + Coding Clinic (Optional Online Session)
Zoom
Dec 01
Artificial Intelligence and Data Science Ethnics

RequiredA Brief Overview of AI governance for Responsible Machine Learning Systems. Navdeep Gill et al. 2022.
OptionalAI for Social Good. Nature Communications. Nenad Tomašev et al. 2020.
OptionalAtlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. Kate Crawford. 2022.
OptionalA Golden Decade of Deep Learning: Computing Systems & Applications. Jeffrey Dean (UW Alumni, Google). 2022.
OptionalWhat is a Neural Network. 3Blue1Brown. 2017.

IV - Data Analytics and Visualization Projects

Dec 03
Project Presentation
Project Presentation Instruction
Dec 12
Final Project Submission
Project Submission Instruction
Final Project DUE 11:59 PM


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