Knowledge Discovery in the Social Sciences: A Data Mining Approach (University of California Press, February 2020) by Xiaoling Shu, professor of sociology, introduces readers to methods for analyzing big data — skills that are in growing demand in both academia and industry jobs. 

Xiaoling Shu’s research focuses on the impacts of two of the most profound processes of our times, marketization and globalization, on gender inequalities, subjective sense of well-being, and gender, family, marriage, and sexual behaviors and attitudes. She uses data science models on national and international data to carry out country-specific (China and the United States) and cross-national analyses. 

Dr. Shu served as the director of East Asian Studies at UC Davis in 2017-22, chair of the Section on Asia and Asian America of the American Sociological Association in 2018-21, president of the International Chinese Sociological Association (formerly NACSA) in 2016-17, and vice-chair and graduate director of Sociology in 2014-17.

She is an affiliate faculty of Computational Social Science, Communication, Data Science & Informatics, East Asian Studies, Feminist Research Institute, and Global Tea Institute.

View the book at the University of California Press