Data Science: Capstone
Start today • 15-20 hours a week
- Certificate
Individual Course
Data Science: Inference and Modeling
Course Length
8 weeks
1-2 hours per week
Featuring faculty from:
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Enroll as Individual
Certificate Price:
$ 149
On demand
Enroll on edXEnroll as Individual
Certificate Price:
$ 149
On demand
Enroll on edXIn this online course taught by Harvard Professor Rafael Irizarry, learn inference and modeling, two of the most widely used statistical tools in data analysis.
Statistical inference and modeling are indispensable for analyzing data affected by chance, and thus essential for data scientists. In this course, you will learn these key concepts through a motivating case study on election forecasting.
This course will show you how inference and modeling can be applied to develop the statistical approaches that make polls an effective tool and we'll show you how to do this using R. You will learn concepts necessary to define estimates and margins of errors and learn how you can use these to make predictions relatively well and also provide an estimate of the precision of your forecast.
Once you learn this you will be able to understand two concepts that are ubiquitous in data science: confidence intervals, and p-values. Then, to understand statements about the probability of a candidate winning, you will learn about Bayesian modeling. Finally, at the end of the course, we will put it all together to recreate a simplified version of an election forecast model and apply it to the 2016 election.
Self-Guided
edX
- Learning Outcome
The very basics of Bayesian statistics and predictive modeling
- Learning Outcome
The concepts necessary to define estimates and margins of errors of populations, parameters, estimates and standard errors in order to make predictions about data
- Learning Outcome
How to use models to aggregate data from different sources
- Learn from Harvard faculty
- Do it on your own time
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Program in this topic
Data Science
These courses can be bundled together to receive a professional certificate at a discounted price.
See program8 Courses available
Data Science: Visualization
Start today • 1-2 hours a week
- Certificate
Data Science: Probability
Start today • 1-2 hours a week
- Certificate
Data Science: Building Machine Learning Models
Start today • 2-4 hours a week
- Certificate
Data Science: Wrangling
Start today • 1-2 hours a week
Data Science: Linear Regression
Start today • 1-2 hours a week
- Certificate
Data Science: R Basics
Start today • 1-2 hours a week
- Certificate
Data Science: Productivity Tools
Start today • 1-2 hours a week
- Certificate
Faculty
Your Instructor
Rafael Irizarry
Professor of Biostatistics, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Rafael Irizarry is a Professor of Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a Professor of Biostatistics and Computational Biology at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. For the past 15 years, Dr. Irizarry’s research has focused on the analysis of genomics data. During this time, he has also taught several classes, all related to applied statistics. Dr. Irizarry is one of the founders of the Bioconductor Project, an open source and open development software project for the analysis of genomic data. His publications related to these topics have been highly cited and his software implementations widely downloaded.
Read full bio.
Ways to take this course
Audit or Pursue a Verified Certificate
A Verified Certificate costs $149 and provides unlimited access to full course materials, activities, tests, and forums. At the end of the course, learners who earn a passing grade can receive a certificate.
Alternatively, learners can Audit the course for free and have access to select course material, activities, tests, and forums. Please note that this track does not offer a certificate for learners who earn a passing grade.
FAQs
No prerequisites are required. However, courses later in the series will assume you have the knowledge and skills acquired from earlier courses.
We suggest learners take the courses in the order in which they appear on the HarvardX Data Science Professional Certificate page.
Yes, to maximize flexibility learners can complete the courses across different runs of the course.
However each individual course must be completed within the same course run as progress on an individual course will not transfer between course runs.
Yes! You don’t need to be a data scientist to take these courses. The HarvardX Data Science Professional Certificate is designed for those who want to learn the fundamentals of data science and programming with R.
Courses in the HarvardX Data Science Professional certificate teaches learners the fundamental knowledge of data science, including essential data science skills such as data wrangling, programming with R, data visualization and other skills.
The HarvardX CS50 courses teaches learners the fundamentals of computer science including some commonly used programming languages such as C, Python, SQL, JavaScript plus CSS, and HTML.Learners in CS50 can explore computer science, mobile app and game development, business technologies, and the art of programming in other CS50 courses.
For more information on CS50 on edX visit the CS50 page.