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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Practical Machine Learning by Johns Hopkins University

4.5
stars
3,239 ratings

About the Course

One of the most common tasks performed by data scientists and data analysts are prediction and machine learning. This course will cover the basic components of building and applying prediction functions with an emphasis on practical applications. The course will provide basic grounding in concepts such as training and tests sets, overfitting, and error rates. The course will also introduce a range of model based and algorithmic machine learning methods including regression, classification trees, Naive Bayes, and random forests. The course will cover the complete process of building prediction functions including data collection, feature creation, algorithms, and evaluation....

Top reviews

MR

Aug 13, 2020

recommended for all the 21st centuary students who might be intrested to play with data in future or some kind of work related to make predictions systemically must have good knowledge of this course

AD

Feb 28, 2017

Issues of every stage of the construction of learning machine model, as well as issues with several different machine learning methods are well and in fine yet very understandable detail explained.

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376 - 400 of 615 Reviews for Practical Machine Learning

By Moiz

•

Feb 3, 2017

By using the caret package, this course took a very pragmatic approach towards machine learning. It demonstrated how to perform all the essential tasks in making the machine (algorithm) learn from data.

In my case, this course required a dedicated time commitment for successful completion. In addition to course lectures, i used the 'Machine Learning with R' book to fill my knowledge gaps. Overall i feels that this course helped me in my journey of gaining a better understanding of this subject.

By Yukai Z

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Dec 9, 2015

A good introductory course for people who has an interest in knowing the principles of machine learning and want to make a step forward. Sufficient details covered throughout the course and additional resources were provided which are very useful. Quizzes were well designed with minor improvements in the accidental mismatch of the answers due to package version issues. Overall the study experience was enjoyable and would definitely recommend to someone who wants to start knowing data science.

By Romain F

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Mar 22, 2017

Good course on the whole, learned a lot and enjoyed it, but it would need to be updated and corrected (certain bits of code don't work as they did when the course was produced, which can be pretty confusing). Would be nice also to add some more content at the end of the course : the lecture about unsupervised prediction felt rushed, and a proper conclusion opening up to the rest of the field would be useful. Anyway thanks again for this wonderful learning opportunity, keep it up ! Cheers

By Carlos S

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Jan 31, 2016

First and foremost I'm so thankful for the exposure to so much material in such a condensed schedule. Very good class. Even though I had to muscle my way through it.

I think the class could be improved with one additional discussion thread for the project.

A guide similar to the ones created for Inferential Statistics and Regression would also have been very helpful.

I benefited immensely from reading parts of the book "An Introduction to Statistical Learning" while taking this course.

By Nate F

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Nov 17, 2021

If this course was updated then it would get 5 stars. Machine Learning has grown so much since this course was created. It would be awesome if they included the parsnip package that is inside the tidyverse. Any student thinking of taking this course then I suggest finishing the first few weeks quickly so that you have ample time to play around with the learning algorithms. Definitely a great course for anyone interested in learning data science

By Robert K

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Nov 14, 2017

I realise that the course is practical machine learning, however I find myself wondering more about the 'whys' than the 'hows' after the course! Still, much benefit and many useful concepts covered which can be revisited in greater detail down the track.

I would also like to see the final assignment change subtly every so often as there are existing completions on the web and it's too easy/tempting for some to simply copy and paste.

By Vathy M K

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Aug 13, 2016

It's very cookbook driven - it's not a deep dive into the topics. This can be dangerous: a little knowledge and all that. However references for more are provided. If you can imitate the coding examples, you should be OK for the assignments. Fair warning: the quizzes are hard to replicate unless you set up your environment to mirror exactly the version of the packages used in the course.

By Siying R

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Nov 27, 2019

This instruction is better than the last one because he can use examples that people from outside the medical world can understand. The quiz is harder than the final project. It requires students to do extra work to figure things out. I see the pattern where the instruction really is the door holder to you and you need to walk in the room and find what you need.

By Jikke R

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Aug 11, 2016

Very enjoyable and generally quite understandable introduction to machine learnings with hands-on approach through the course project. It was a bit too fast-paced and generic for my liking, but many options were offered and highlighted for finding additional learning documents and courses to be able to deepen the knowledge acquired in this course.

By Sean Q Z

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Dec 11, 2016

As the title states, very practical way to show you how this is done in R.

Most of them are lines of codes and some explanation. There are tons of details behind that and remains un-explained.

As other courses in the specialization, students need to do a lot of self-study to further understand machine learning.

But at least, learned a lot.

By Charles W

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Dec 8, 2019

I think some material might need to be revised, but I thought it was very interesting to see everybody's model building code (and perhaps that can also help me in the future).

While it is mixed with other notes, I have more detailed thoughts in this blog post: http://cdwscience.blogspot.com/2019/12/experiences-with-on-line-courses.html

By Jorge E M O

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Sep 7, 2018

The course rushes over a lot of concepts and it already shows its age - however, it's a pretty solid introduction to machine learning from a practical perspective. It will provide you with a lot of ideas for further investigation and exploration and in the end you'll end up with a wide vision of the machine learning process.

By Brandon K

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Mar 30, 2016

The lectures were great and engaging. I felt like they went too fast. Jeff says at the beginning that this is just an overview and points to some other resources. As an overview, this class works well. You can expect to learn a bit about what machine learning is and how to to do it using the caret package in R.

By Oliver S

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Jul 26, 2019

A reference solution for the quiz questions as there are in some other courses in this specialization would have been nice, since I got sometimes very different results using the newest versions of the libraries and I'd really like to know, if I made any big mistakes and it's not only because of my setup.

By Lukas M

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Oct 5, 2017

The lectures are very good to get the basic knowledge about machine learning. One suggestion is that the lectures can be longer, covering more detailed stuff and a little bit more advanced materials. Moreover, some codes are not explained clean and clear for me. Hope it would be better in the future.

By Robert S

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Sep 16, 2019

The lecture material is great, but the quiz material is in need of updating. R and it's packages have gone through many updates since the problems were written so it is sometimes difficult to reproduce their results even with running the sample codes given after getting the answer correct.

By Lucas

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Jun 3, 2016

This course allows you to implement practical solutions using machine learning algorithms without having to know the mechanisms behind the calculations in detail. Unfortunately questions in the discussion forum were quite rare and many questions were not resolved during this course.

By Swapnil A

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Jun 9, 2017

The course covers few important topics in R like cross validation, decision trees, random forest etc. which comes in very handy for a data science aspirant. It expects the participant to have a descent knowledge in R. Overall, I am pretty satisfied with this course. Thanks!

By Deleted A

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Oct 25, 2017

This course is brief but it has the 2 best ingredients for having a really decent first step in Machine Learning:

1) It covers a broad group of different algorithms

2) It provides reference material for those in which you want to get deeper.

Really good job in this course.

By Yuriy V

•

Mar 10, 2016

I liked the course and found it informative, but wish there were more stuff on unsupervised learning neural network algorithms (SOMs). Learning about most used algos are great, but would also like to know other machine learning algos that are used concurrently.

By Marcus S S

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Feb 25, 2017

Great course! The hands-on approach make it very useful for one to start doing some very interesting analysis in real life! Thanks a lot! You guys could only make some efforts in updating some classes and packages used in quizzes. But the rest was great!

By Rohit P

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Nov 13, 2016

Lectures were not very detailed.

Quizzes were good and challenging, but too many times the results didn't match the answers even when the random seed was set right

Final project should have been more challenging with more models to build and compare

By subrata s

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Mar 9, 2017

Very good course. The content can be enriched with some more technical details behind the various techniques. There needs to be 1 more course on Practical Machine Learning in the specialization as 1 course is far too less for such a vast topic.

By Samuel Q

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Oct 24, 2018

Good course to get only the basics of machine learning. The assignments and quizzes are great but the lecture material is very brief and short. The references provided throughout the lectures are probably the best source of more information.

By Robert W S

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Nov 21, 2016

Great intro to machine learning. Several algorithms with some ideas on sampling and pre-processing techniques are covered. Adding a textbook as done with some of the other data science classes would help, but other resources are referenced.