Applied Data Science with R Specialization

When working in the data science field you will definitely become acquainted with the R language and the role it plays in data analysis. This course introduces you to the basics of the R language such as data types, techniques for manipulation, and how to implement fundamental programming tasks.

You will begin the process of understanding common data structures, programming fundamentals and how to manipulate data all with the help of the R programming language. The emphasis in this course is hands-on and practical learning . You will write a simple program using RStudio, manipulate data in a data frame or matrix, and complete a final project as a data analyst using Watson Studio and Jupyter notebooks to acquire and analyze data-driven insights. No prior knowledge of R, or programming is required.

Much of the world's data resides in databases. SQL (or Structured Query Language) is a powerful language which is used for communicating with and extracting data from databases. A working knowledge of databases and SQL is a must if you want to become a data scientist.

The purpose of this course is to introduce relational database concepts and help you learn and apply foundational knowledge of the SQL and R languages. It is also intended to get you started with performing SQL access in a data science environment. The emphasis in this course is on hands-on and practical learning. As such, you will work with real databases, real data science tools, and real-world datasets. You will create a database instance in the cloud. Through a series of hands-on labs, you will practice building and running SQL queries. You will also learn how to access databases from Jupyter notebooks using SQL and R. No prior knowledge of databases, SQL, R, or programming is required. Anyone can audit this course at no charge. If you choose to take this course and earn the Coursera course certificate, you can also earn an IBM digital badge upon successful completion of the course.

The R programming language is purpose-built for data analysis. R is the key that opens the door between the problems that you want to solve with data and the answers you need to meet your objectives. This course starts with a question and then walks you through the process of answering it through data. You will first learn important techniques for preparing (or wrangling) your data for analysis. You will then learn how to gain a better understanding of your data through exploratory data analysis, helping you to summarize your data and identify relevant relationships between variables that can lead to insights. Once your data is ready to analyze, you will learn how to develop your model and evaluate and tune its performance. By following this process, you can be sure that your data analysis performs to the standards that you have set, and you can have confidence in the results.

You will build hands-on experience by playing the role of a data analyst who is analyzing airline departure and arrival data to predict flight delays. Using an Airline Reporting Carrier On-Time Performance Dataset, you will practice reading data files, preprocessing data, creating models, improving models, and evaluating them to ultimately choose the best model. Watch the videos, work through the labs, and add to your portfolio. Good luck! Note: The pre-requisite for this course is basic R programming skills. For example, ensure that you have completed a course like Introduction to R Programming for Data Science from IBM.

In this course, you will learn the Grammar of Graphics, a system for describing and building graphs, and how the ggplot2 data visualization package for R applies this concept to basic bar charts, histograms, pie charts, scatter plots, line plots, and box plots. You will also learn how to further customize your charts and plots using themes and other techniques. You will then learn how to use another data visualization package for R called Leaflet to create map plots, a unique way to plot data based on geolocation data. Finally, you will be introduced to creating interactive dashboards using the R Shiny package. You will learn how to create and customize Shiny apps, alter the appearance of the apps by adding HTML and image components, and deploy your interactive data apps on the web.

You will practice what you learn and build hands-on experience by completing labs in each module and a final project at the end of the course. Watch the videos, work through the labs, and watch your data science skill grow. Good luck! NOTE: This course requires knowledge of working with R and data. If you do not have these skills, it is highly recommended that you first take the Introduction to R Programming for Data Science as well as the Data Analysis with R courses from IBM prior to starting this course. Note: The pre-requisite for this course is basic R programming skills.