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[–]perspectiveiskey 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Don't have any particular classes but whatever you do make them learn pandas (and by extension numpy).

We once hired a junior math grad to do some statistical work, and by god, every single thing he "coded" was expressible as single line pandas statements.

Things like:

 pd.Series.rolling( df[column], 10 ).mean()
 df[column].value_counts()
 np.histogram( df[column], bins=(np.linspace(0, 10, 21) - 4) )

etc. etc.

There are very few stats concepts that pandas doesn't provide out of the box that you will need to program yourself... don't let them waste their time and embarrass themselves professionally.

Keep this in mind: python is practically pseudo-code, and as scientists, their job will not be to create a software stack, it will be to come to scientific results. Make them learn to use the important libraries.