Individual Course

Data Science: Machine Learning

Course Length

8 weeks

2-4 hours a week

Featuring faculty from:

Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Enroll as Individual

Class:

Certificate Price:

$ 149

Enroll on edX

In this online course taught by Harvard Professor Rafael Irizarry, build a movie recommendation system and learn the science behind one of the most popular and successful data science techniques.

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,part of our Professional Certificate Program in Data Science, 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.

Self-Guided

EDX

Harvard Case Method Premium Learning

Learning Outcome

The basics of machine learning

Learning Outcome

How to perform cross-validation to avoid over-training and how to build a recommendation system

Learning Outcome

What is regularization and why it is useful

Learn from Harvard faculty
Do it on your own time
Get a certificate, add it to your resume
Be part of the Harvard Community

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.

The first course that I enrolled in was CS50's Introduction to Computer Science. Through that, I learned programming and I was so excited on how the course materials were delivered.

Ebenezer A.

Complete your journey with this Professional Certificate Series

These courses can be bundled together to receive a professional certificate at a discounted price.

Learn More

9 Courses
1 Year & 5 Months
Earn Your Certificate

Data Science: Capstone

15-20 hours a week • Starting Oct 15, 2025

Data Science: Visualization

1-2 hours a week • Starting Oct 25, 2025