MITx: Understanding the World Through Data -

Speech recognition, drones, and self-driving cars – things that once seemed like pure science fiction – are now widely available technologies, and just a few examples of how humans have taught machines to analyze data and make decisions. In this hands-on, introductory course, you will examine all the forms in which data exists, learn tools that uncover relationships between data, and leverage basic algorithms to understand the world from a new perspective.

Whether you're a high school student or someone switching careers, all you need to get started in this course is a curiosity about the topic of machine learning and a willingness to tinker around with your computer.

The course is taught by modules. Within each module, you'll have access to videos, short exercises, and a final capstone project. In Module 1, you'll begin by looking at different kinds of data. To help you explore the data, you'll dive right into some programming with the Python programming language. You don't need to have any programming background, we will guide you on how to leverage Python to explore and visualize any data.

One kind of data you'll work with is data that relates one variable to another. Coming up with a relationship between two variables—one depending on the other—is at the center of Module 2. In that module, you'll build up some core concepts before seeing your first machine learning algorithm. The goal is to use programming to create models that describe mathematical relationships between data. You'll be able to see how good the model is and use it to make predictions about new data.

In Module 3, you'll see a discussion about where imperfections in collected data might come from. You rarely have perfectly “clean” data sets, so it's important to understand how imperfections impact the model that an algorithm might come up with. To this end, we will introduce the notion of data distributions and build up to the concepts of biased and unbiased noise.

Another kind of data you'll work with is data that belongs in different groups (or classes). Creating a model that predicts what group data belongs in is at the center of Module 4. You'll work through different ways of thinking about this problem and see three different ways of approaching making such groupings (classification).