Data Science: R Basics

Build a foundation in R and learn how to wrangle, analyze, and visualize data.

Created by: Rafael Irizarry

Produced in 2017

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Overall Score : 80 / 100

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Course Description

The first in our Professional Certificate Program in Data Science, this course will introduce you to the basics of R programming. You can better retain R when you learn it to solve a specific problem, so you'll use a real-world dataset about crime in the United States. You will learn the R skills needed to answer essential questions about differences in crime across the different states.
We'll cover R's functions and data types, then tackle how to operate on vectors and when to use advanced functions like sorting. You'll learn how to apply general programming features like "if-else," and "for loop" commands, and how to wrangle, analyze and visualize data.
Rather than covering every R skill you might need, you'll build a strong foundation to prepare you for the more in-depth courses later in the series, where we cover concepts like probability, inference, regression, and machine learning. We help you develop a skill set that includes R programming, data wrangling with dplyr, data visualization with ggplot2, file organization with UNIX/Linux, version control with git and GitHub, and reproducible document preparation with RStudio.
The demand for skilled data science practitioners is rapidly growing, and this series prepares you to tackle real-world data analysis challenges.

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Instructor Details

Rafael Irizarry

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 has 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.

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Reviews

4.0

11 total reviews

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By Kurp K on 11/12/2017

Perfect! I loved the course and I'm going to complete the whole Harvard's Data Science program (9 courses ahead). I liked the instructor, the subject is perfectly clarified and the videos are engaging. The course is very concise - no chance to get bored. Perfect solution for everyone who looks for R fundamentals and basic statistics course in one place.

By Akhil V on 12/26/2017

I'd recommend it to any beginner who wants to grasp a broad concept and applicability of R language, though the concepts don't go very deep in general.

By Patrice J on 9/15/2017

I found it to be an engaging introduction to R. In it base functions and some verbs of the popular R package dplyr were taught. Practice exercises were done in the Datacamp console which I appreciated, especially since I am already familiar with it. The professor was clear and the lessons were well paced.

By Anonymous on 7/28/2019

I just finished the course. I believe it provides a fairly simple introduction to R programming. The course is well structured, video lectures are good. The fact that key points are written under the video is quite helpful if you need a quick reminder when working on the assignments.I did not think the course was particularly hard. If you have some programming experience you will certainly face no problems.

By Susann on 1/12/2019

The course explains the basics very well. The exercises are useful, but the instructions on Datacamp are sometimes not clear.

By Claudia S on 11/3/2017

A really good introduction to R! You'll get to know a great deal in a concise and fun way.

By Colby on 1/20/2019

The data champ platform and videos do not mesh well. The lessons teach you operations but I left the course with a shaky understanding. Some assignments are unclear and some concepts are glossed over.

By Aruparna Maity on 11/30/2018

The course content was too poor. Though it is a basic course, the content could have easy included more- could have included plots, loops, etc... The provider is perfect and the instructor was fine. But the presentation of the lesson videos was not impressive, and attractive.

By Laszlo Fulop on 11/12/2018

The video lectures are easily understandable, the assignments are not very difficult but they are good for practicing. I think I got basics and also I got so intrested in R as to I'm looking for courses to learn more of it. So I can recommend this course to any beginners.

By hamelg on 3/13/2018

Data Science: R Basics is an excellent first course for complete beginners to start their journey with R programming and data science. This course should also prove useful to those who might already know how to program in another language, but would like to learn R. My only real complaint is that the data used throughout the course and its assignments is related to murders in the U.S. which is a bit of a morbid subject for what is meant to be a light and highly accessible introductory course.

By Misanthreville on 1/3/2019

Currently enrolled in the Harvard program. As someone who has taken a ton of data science courses online, the Harvard courses are by far the poorest in terms of how they're designed. The professor skips a TON of material and explains some topics very badly.