R: Web Scraping

Collecting and preprocessing data is always the first step in a data analysis project or in a machine learning pipeline. The web plays a crucial role here: Often, authoritative statistical data are published as tables on regularly updated websites. Data found on social networks might provide valuable ground truth for training machine learning algorithms. However, gathering data from websites is often not that straightforward and requires an understanding of the architecture of the web.

In this course, you'll learn how to leverage R to collect and parse data found on various kinds of websites. By doing so, you'll get to know typical website architectures and how to approach them efficiently for scraping. The first part of the course will be held remotely and will introduce various concepts and R functions, while the second part will be held on site, where you'll be faced with some hands-on scraping challenges.

General information

Dates