There are a number of really good ways get started learning Data Science. I just came across this really nice Data Science certificate course from Harvard/edX. The Data Science certificate program offers a series of courses that covers the basics of Data Science; probability, statistical inference, regression, and machine learning.
It uses R programming and thus you will also learn data wrangling with dplyr, data visualization with ggplot2, working with files in Unix/Linux, version control with git and GitHub, and reproducible document preparation with RStudio.
One of the real treats is that all the data science courses in this are taught by Raefael Irizarry. a professor and head of Harvard Stat and world leading Data Scientist/Statistician.
Another biggest highlight is that, I just found that HarvardX has partnered with DataCamp for working on the assignments. DataCamp’s coding technology allows the participants to get hands-on coding practice, which I think is pretty cool.
There are 9 courses in the Data Science program, each runs for about 2-4 weeks and requires 2-4 hours of effort per week per course. Here are the list of courses in the Data Science certification program.
- Data Science: R Basics
- Data Science: Visualization
- Data Science: Probability
- Data Science: Inference and Modeling
- Data Science: Productivity Tools
- Data Science: Wrangling
- Data Science: Linear Regression
- Data Science: Machine Learning
- Data Science: Capstone
A few sample data set used in the Data Science Case studies include: “Trends in World Health and Economics, US Crime Rates, The Financial Crisis of 2007-2008, Election Forecasting, Building a Baseball Team (inspired by Moneyball), and Movie Recommendation Systems”.
Check out the HarvardX Data Science site to learn more about this program.
