About this course


To become an expert data scientist you need practice and experience. By completing this capstone project you will get an opportunity to apply the knowledge and skills in R data analysis that you have gained throughout the series. This final project will test your skills in data visualization, probability, inference and modeling, data wrangling, data organization, regression, and machine learning.

Unlike the rest of ourProfessional Certificate Program in Data Science, in this course, you will receive much less guidance from the instructors. When you complete the project you will have a data product to show off to potential employers or educational programs, a strong indicator of your expertise in the field of data science.




Learning Formats: Videos
Institutions: Harvard University

About this course


Perhaps the most popular data science methodologies come from machine learning. What distinguishes machine learning from other computer guided decision processes is that it builds prediction algorithms using data. Some of the most popular products that use machine learning include the handwriting readers implemented by the postal service, speech recognition, movie recommendation systems, and spam detectors.

In this course, you will learn popular machine learning algorithms, principal component analysis, and regularization by building a movie recommendation system.

You will learn about training data, and how to use a set of data to discover potentially predictive relationships. As you build the movie recommendation system, you will learn how to train algorithms using training data so you can predict the outcome for future datasets. You will also learn about overtraining and techniques to avoid it such as cross-validation. All of these skills are fundamental to machine learning.




Learning Formats: Videos
Institutions: Harvard University

About this course

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Linear regression is commonly used to quantify the relationship between two or more variables. It is also used to adjust for confounding. This course, part ofourProfessional Certificate Program in Data Science, covers how to implement linear regression and adjust for confounding in practice using R.

In data science applications, it is very common to be interested in the relationship between two or more variables. The motivating case study we examine in this course relates to the data-driven approach used to construct baseball teams described in Moneyball. We will try to determine which measured outcomes best predict baseball runs by using linear regression.

We will also examine confounding, where extraneous variables affect the relationship between two or more other variables, leading to spurious associations. Linear regression is a powerful technique for removing confounders, but it is not a magical process. It is essential to understand when it is appropriate to use, and this course will teach you when to apply this technique.




Learning Formats: Videos
Institutions: Harvard University

About this course


In this course, part of our Professional Certificate Program in Data Science, we cover several standard steps of the data wrangling process like importing data into R, tidying data, string processing, HTML parsing, working with dates and times, and text mining. Rarely are all these wrangling steps necessary in a single analysis, but a data scientist will likely face them all at some point.

Very rarely is data easily accessible in a data science project. It's more likely for the data to be in a file, a database, or extracted from documents such as web pages, tweets, or PDFs. In these cases, the first step is to import the data into R and tidy the data, using the tidyverse package. The steps that convert data from its raw form to the tidy form is called data wrangling.

This process is a critical step for any data scientist. Knowing how to wrangle and clean data will enable you to make critical insights that would otherwise be hidden.




Learning Formats: Videos
Institutions: Harvard University

About this course


A typical data analysis project may involve several parts, each including several data files and different scripts with code. Keeping all this organized can be challenging.

Part of our Professional Certificate Program in Data Science, this course explains how to use Unix/Linux as a tool for managing files and directories on your computer and how to keep the file system organized. You will be introduced to the version control systems git, a powerful tool for keeping track of changes in your scripts and reports. We also introduce you to GitHub and demonstrate how you can use this service to keep your work in a repository that facilitates collaborations.

Finally, you will learn to write reports in R markdown which permits you to incorporate text and code into a document. We'll put it all together using the powerful integrated desktop environment RStudio.




Learning Formats: Videos
Institutions: Harvard University

About this course


As part of our Professional Certificate Program in Data Science, this course covers the basics of data visualization and exploratory data analysis. We will use three motivating examples and ggplot2, a data visualization package for the statistical programming language R. We will start with simple datasets and then graduate to case studies about world health, economics, and infectious disease trends in the United States.

The growing availability of informative datasets and software tools has led to increased reliance on data visualizations across many areas. Data visualization provides a powerful way to communicate data-driven findings, motivate analyses, and detect flaws. 

This course will give you the skills you need to leverage data to reveal valuable insights and advance your career.




Learning Formats: Videos
Institutions: Harvard University

About this course


In this course, we begin with approaches to visualization of genome-scale data, and provide tools to build interactive graphical interfaces to speed discovery and interpretation.

We study out-of-memory approaches to the analysis of very large data resources, using relational databases or HDF5 as "back ends" with familiar R interfaces. Multiomic data integration is illustrated using a curated version of The Cancer Genome Atlas. 

Finally, we explore cloud-resident resources developed for the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (the ENCODE project). These address transcription factor binding, ATAC-seq, and RNA-seq with CRISPR interference.

These courses make up two Professional Certificates and are self-paced:




Learning Formats: Videos
Institutions: Harvard University