Data Science by Harvard University

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 the Data Science course offered by Harvard University -

• You will learn popular machine learning algorithms, principal component analysis, and regularisation by building a movie recommendation system.
• You will learn about training data, a set of data used to discover potentially predictive relationships and how the data can come in the form of the outcome we want to predict and features that we will use to predict this outcome.
• 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.

• The basics of machine learning
• How to perform cross-validation to avoid overtraining
• Several popular machine learning algorithms
• How to build a recommendation system
• What is regularization and why it is useful?

Rafael Irizarry

• Professor of Biostatistics
• Harvard University