Foundations of Data Science

As the demand for data science skills rises around the world, this Professional Certificate by BerkeleyX will teach you how to combine data with Python programming skills to ask questions and explore problems that you may encounter in a future job, in any field of study, and even in everyday life. This course will give you a new lens to explore the issues and problems that you care about. Among others, Berkeley’s online data science program has been endorsed by Google’s Vice President of Education and Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of Cloud AI. The program is based on Data 8, UC Berkeley’s fastest-growing class, taken by more than 3300 students each year as they start their data science journey. Data 8 is recognized amongst institutions as the preeminent introductory data science course has helped place UC Berkeley at the forefront of democratizing data science for all. Top-ranked universities from around the world, such as Yale, Cornell, and NYU, have followed Berkeley’s lead by creating their own versions of UC Berkeley’s groundbreaking data science course. Through this professional certificate, students all over the world can now take UC Berkeley’s most popular course. This course is accessible for students who have not previously taken statistics or computer science courses. No prior programming experience is assumed or necessary. Through instructor guided videos and labs, you will learn about topics starting from fundamental data science concepts to machine learning methods. This program will help you become a data scientist by teaching you how to analyze a diverse set of real data sets including economic data, geographic data, and public health data. Typically, the information will be incomplete and there will be some uncertainty involved. You will learn how to conduct inference, which will help you quantify uncertainty and measure the accuracy of your estimates. Finally, you will put all of your knowledge together and learn about prediction using machine learning. We all have to be able to think critically and make decisions based on data. Thus, the program aims to make data science accessible to everyone. The program focuses on a set of core concepts and techniques that have broad applicability. Unlike “bootcamps” for programmers, this program presents data science as a way of thinking, in which interpretation and communication are as important as computation and statistical methods. You don’t have to download any software – a browser is all you need. Open up a window and prepare to have some fun.