Coursera's Machine Learning class by Andrew Ng of Stanford University

Recently I took the Machine Learning Course offered on Coursera's website which is taught by Andrew Ng of Stanford university. I am really pleased with what Professor Ng has done here. His course covers a lot of material in a very accessible and understandable way that makes this course useful to non-experts and serves as a nice refresher to those who work in the field. I also really like his teaching style.

I find that I only like about 50% of the Coursera classes that I look at or take. I am not sure if that is a good yield or not. It is just my experience. I am a big fan of the Data Science track which is taught by a group of Professors out of the Bloomberg School of Health at the John Hopkins. It is a really great series of classes taught well that truly give you the tools to start doing real work in the field of data science. If you are just getting started and really want to start work with data I would strongly recommend that track. It is based in R using RStudio and GitHub.

If there is one complaint that I have with the Machine Learning class it is that it is not taught in R. It is taught in Octive and Matlab. Not that those are not useful languages or environments to do this work. I just feel that for the type of people who might be taking this class R is more appropriate. I understand that I have an R basis, but there is a reason for this opinion beyond that. Within the Coursera classes in this area of interest R is the dominate language used so the use of R here would apply some consistency to the portfolio. My weakest link is learning new programming languages so not to need to do that is really helpful to me and allows me to spend more time learning the concept other then learning a new programming language. Secondly the student are more likely to be taught in R at their school and university. So by teaching basics of R on Coursera student will be further along the learning curve of R when they need to use it in practice.

Link to Coursera Machine Learning Class