DSA4262 Sense-making Case Analysis: Health and Medicine (2026)

Undergraduate Year 4 Course, National University of Singapore, Department of Statistics and Data Science, 2026

I will teach DSA4262 Sense-making Case Analysis: Health & Medicine in 2026.

Course synopsis

This course will give you the opportunity to apply your data science skills to real-world problems in healthcare. Through a series of technical workshops and (guest) lectures, we will cover the foundational knowledge required for this course. You will learn about the Singaporean healthcare system, healthcare datasets and their unique characteristics, relevant machine learning approaches including natural language processing, psychology and mental health, and product development frameworks. You will learn how to make sense of real-world problems, facing ambiguous situations and formulating succinct hypotheses.

The course will be interactive and project-based, without a final exam. We will cover healthcare in general, but your group project assignment will be focused on the timely topic of mental health. You will use your skills to (1) build a predictive model and (2) conceptualise and design a real-world solution on top of it in the style of a hackathon.

At the end of the course, you will have a better understanding of healthcare and careers in this industry, more hands-on experience with real-world problem statements, and a GitHub project to add to your portfolio. You will also get opportunities to network with healthcare leaders in Singapore through the guest lectures.

Hackathon labs

We will use the following datasets for the hackathon labs.

Thousand Voices of Trauma

Mental Health Datasets

Recommended reading

  1. Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. Atul Gawande.
  2. Co-Intelligence. Ethan Mollick (2024).
  3. Essential Psychology: A Concise Introduction.
  4. Healthcare Transformation Using Artificial Intelligence. Robert JT Morris (2025).
  5. Losing Our Minds. Lucy Foulkes.
  6. Myth or Magic: The Singapore Healthcare System. Jeremy Lim.
  7. Robust Behavioural Science. Amy Orben (2021).
  8. Saloni’s Guide to Data Visualization. Saloni Dattani (2025).
  9. The AI Revolution in Medicine: GPT-4 and Beyond. Peter Lee, Carey Goldberg, and Isaac Kohane (2024).
  10. The Gift of Therapy. Yalom Irvin.
  11. The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. Oliver Sacks.
  12. Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. Robert Sapolsky.
  13. Working Backwards. Colin Bryar.