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Berkeley offers its data science course online for free

news.berkeley.edu

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Re: Berkeley offers its data science course online for free

#131

Post by jamestimmins »

trendnet wrote: post #101
jamestimmins wrote: post #5

I find it curious that there are so many courses for data-science related subjects, which superficially seem to cover the same material, and relatively few courses covering more traditional CS topics such as computer systems, networks, OS. I suppose it has to do with the market, but also feels like colleges are skating to where the puck is, rather than where it will be (or perhaps, where it could be).

GaTech has a lot of good MOOC Computer System courses.

Yeah they seem to be one of the few that's really leading the way here.

Re: Berkeley offers its data science course online for free

#132

Post by jamestimmins »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #84
jamestimmins wrote: post #5

I find it curious that there are so many courses for data-science related subjects, which superficially seem to cover the same material, and relatively few courses covering more traditional CS topics such as computer systems, networks, OS. I suppose it has to do with the market, but also feels like colleges are skating to where the puck is, rather than where it will be (or perhaps, where it could be).

Our computer security course at Berkeley regularly attracts 600+ students. Berkeley is doing fine in terms of traditional course offerings.

I meant in terms of online courses. Would love to see that class put online.

Re: Berkeley offers its data science course online for free

#133

Post by nerdponx »

master_yoda_1 wrote: post #130

I think this is a bad trend. These university make basic courses free to gain popularity and then ask for big money for their real courses. This is bad in two ways: 1) The people taking these courses do not learn much for the effort and time they spend. Also it gives them illusion that they know enough as they take course from big university. 2) Industry is already so confused in hiring, they hire by name. So even yo…

A course called "[Intro to] data science" should be taken about as seriously in hiring as "Intro to computer science", or "Intro to mechanical engineering". There's no reason these courses should bear any weight in hiring, and it's disingenuous to attempt to lead people to believe otherwise.

Re: Berkeley offers its data science course online for free

#136

Post by graycat »

subroutine wrote: post #121
graycat wrote: post #23

Okay, here's a view of what appears to be part of the course: We have a course (right a school application of stuff taught in school!) with two teachers, that is, two sections of the course, each section with its own teacher and its own students. At the end of the two courses, that is, the two sections, we want to compare the teachers. So we give the same test to all of the students from both courses. Suppose one sec…

What you are describing is known as bootstrapping (if sampling with replacement) jackknifing (if sampling without replacement), or (in the case you want to run a significance test, and not simply create a distribution or stats like confidence intervals) a permutation test. I think you already know that; I'm just mentioning in case others want to look these up by name. Also while they can be called 'distribution free'…

Nice!

Yup. Thanks.

> known as the empirical distribution

Yup, and I wrote:

"out in a tail of the empirical distribution"

Yup, "rank" tests, "permutation" tests: With my TeX markup:

E.\ L.\ Lehmann, {\it Nonparametrics: Statistical Methods Based on Ranks,\/}

And, yup, again with my TeX markup,

Bradley Efron, {\it The Jackknife, the Bootstrap, and Other Resampling Plans,\/}

Last time I knew, Roger Wets was at UCSD. He read one of my papers and suggested JOTA where I did publish it!

Re: Berkeley offers its data science course online for free

#137

Post by master_yoda_1 »

nerdponx wrote: post #133
master_yoda_1 wrote: post #130

I think this is a bad trend. These university make basic courses free to gain popularity and then ask for big money for their real courses. This is bad in two ways: 1) The people taking these courses do not learn much for the effort and time they spend. Also it gives them illusion that they know enough as they take course from big university. 2) Industry is already so confused in hiring, they hire by name. So even yo…

A course called "[Intro to] data science" should be taken about as seriously in hiring as "Intro to computer science", or "Intro to mechanical engineering". There's no reason these courses should bear any weight in hiring, and it's disingenuous to attempt to lead people to believe otherwise.

I was talking about people who study in depth on their own after the course.

Re: Berkeley offers its data science course online for free

#138

Post by kwillets »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #127
wakkaflokka wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually become somewhat hilarious to me. Like you said, the data science label is being applied quite liberally (no judgment, I'm not the world's authority on how it should be applied), so here you have companies paying $100k or more to have people do Excel work or Tableau visualizations.

"Data scientist" is the new "business analyst".

I think data science moved into the hole where analysis used to be.

Re: Berkeley offers its data science course online for free

#139

Post by kwillets »

mr_toad wrote: post #45
resolaibohp wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have also found this interesting. What I don't understand is that the amount of data science jobs are no where near the levels that people make it seem. I am not sure where all these people will end up working if they want to be a data scientist. There is not a need to hire huge teams of data scientists like you might for dev roles, it doesn't scale the same way.

Every job that involves data in any way is being relabeled a data science job. Most of them are just generating dashboards and posters in Excel or Tableau for people who are data illiterate. I know many people with maths/stats/comp-sci backgrounds who end up in these sorts of jobs. “Just add a bunch of green up arrows and red down arrows, your manager will love it” was advice from a co-worker of mine. Sadly, she was…

Data engineering as well.

Re: Berkeley offers its data science course online for free

#140

Post by jwilbs »

cbHXBY1D wrote: post #129
gnulinux wrote: post #60

I'm a UC Berkeley alum. When I was there this was a course taken by humanity majors to learn some programming so that their Resume looks cooler. majority of STEM majors take CS 61A (SICP) or E7 (Programming in MATLAB). Just noting this as a context, this is not the class intended for CS majors; this : https://cs61a.org/ one is.

Or if you want to get experience with data science: Stats 134 (easy), CS188 (medium), CS189 (hard).

I personally thought Stats 134 was the hardest of those courses by far (though I took it under a visiting professor who was needlessly difficult). 188 was a breeze, and I believe the full course is offered for free on edx
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