Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Statistical Learning MOOC by Stanford

I took the course and this is a short summary of my feelings about it.

Pros:

  • there was some humor (or attempts of it) by presenters
  • the book this course is based on is very good, at least the few pages of it that I managed to read
  • the interviews with the original inventors of some of the methods were cool!
Cons:
  • the quizzes were rather cryptic and of very variable difficulty, especially the ones concerning R
  • if you answered incorrectly then "show answer" was sometimes very helpful and other times not at all
If you've done mostly Coursera courses, then the style of quizzes is very different - the current course asks your intuition about exceptions to the rule. It will show you the limitations of what you just learned and is best treated as an additional learning resource. The forums were fairly dead, compared to your regular Coursera course, but still helpful - all you really need is one good answer.

In conclusion, the course helped me see and understand some new aspects of modeling. As it was my main goal anyway, then it's all good.

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