Chevron Left
Back to Introduction to Data Science in Python

Learner Reviews & Feedback for Introduction to Data Science in Python by University of Michigan

4.5
stars
26,898 ratings

About the Course

This course will introduce the learner to the basics of the python programming environment, including fundamental python programming techniques such as lambdas, reading and manipulating csv files, and the numpy library. The course will introduce data manipulation and cleaning techniques using the popular python pandas data science library and introduce the abstraction of the Series and DataFrame as the central data structures for data analysis, along with tutorials on how to use functions such as groupby, merge, and pivot tables effectively. By the end of this course, students will be able to take tabular data, clean it, manipulate it, and run basic inferential statistical analyses. This course should be taken before any of the other Applied Data Science with Python courses: Applied Plotting, Charting & Data Representation in Python, Applied Machine Learning in Python, Applied Text Mining in Python, Applied Social Network Analysis in Python....

Top reviews

YH

Sep 28, 2021

This is the practical course.There is some concepts and assignments like: pandas, data-frame, merge and time. The asg 3 and asg4 are difficult but I think that it's very useful and improve my ability.

PK

May 9, 2020

The course had helped in understanding the concepts of NumPy and pandas. The assignments were so helpful to apply these concepts which provide an in-depth understanding of the Numpy as well as pandans

Filter by:

301 - 325 of 5,915 Reviews for Introduction to Data Science in Python

By Mayank J

Apr 11, 2020

The instructor was pathetic. He is simply reading the text and not putting in any efforts to explain things.

By Lulu L

Nov 21, 2016

The lectures are insufficient, the homework instructions are incorrect, the autograder is terrible.

By Suwandy W

May 31, 2020

the teaching materials provided by christopher is too brief. can be improve by more elaboration.

By Vikash K

Jun 22, 2018

pathetic course. Not for anyone who wants to learn python. Its for them who already know python

By SARTHAK S

Nov 28, 2020

Very tough question asked without proper teaching. Course should be made learning oriented.

By Madhubalini V

Nov 2, 2020

very hard assignment and confusing that i have to withdraw from doing :(

By Adeel J

Oct 29, 2017

Instructor is not interested in teaching but just reading out the script

By ROMASANTA, M J (

Oct 30, 2019

This course is not suited for beginners, who wanted to learn python.

By Sourav S

Jun 26, 2018

Horrible. Explains nothingJohns Hopkins data science is FAR superior

By SAFO E

Jan 12, 2021

i have been unable to follow the course and i want to exit

By Md I H

Aug 8, 2020

Poorly organised. No helpful resource. Really sad course.

By Zhen H

Aug 27, 2017

Vedio is useless, I only need to go through the code.

By Alireza A

Nov 10, 2019

the teaching pace is very fast and not so clear.

By Brics C

Oct 27, 2019

Gap between lecture and assignment is too high.

By james c

Apr 30, 2019

Disconnected, too broad, could have been great.

By Justin S

Nov 2, 2018

Worst class ever! The instructor sucks!

By Shivani A

Sep 24, 2019

Not exactly benefited.Too fast

By 许骐

Jan 30, 2019

autograding system is terrible

By Bugra S

Jan 2, 2018

assigments are not clear

By Nitin K S

Dec 5, 2019

The speed is too fast

By Ayush J

Aug 28, 2020

not good course

By mah v

Sep 25, 2020

It's boring.

By SOMENATH C

Sep 2, 2020

outdated

By Aino J

Jan 6, 2020

IN SHORT

This was a great course and I learnt a lot! Topics covered include a quick reminder on intermediate python and lots on pandas and some numpy. The weeks 3 and 4 assignments are quite challenging so expect to spend considerably more time than indicated on the course site if you're not experienced with python and pandas. This course is not for coding newbies.

IN DETAIL

I am proficient in R for data analysis and had dabbled with python before although had no experience with pandas. I was committed to learn the course material and to spend a substantial amount of time doing so. The speed of lectures is fast. I paused often to take notes and to try out the provided notebooks, and I returned to some of the videos when working on the assignments. I found the course assignments good and challenging. The lectures give a good tour of different functions and approaches you may want to use in the assignments, but there isn't much handholding with the assignments and you'll most likely spend quite of bit of time looking things up online in pandas docs and stackoverflow. If you're used to that and generally troubleshooting code, you'll probably be just fine. I spent much more time on the assignments than what is estimated on the site: ~5h for week 2 (vs 1.5h indicated), ~1 day for week 3 (vs 2h), and 2.5 days for week 4 (vs 4h).

Week 1 gives a refresher on how to write functions, list comprehensions, and lambdas in python. If you're familiar with writing loops and functions in other languages, with this material you will get to writing them in python quickly if you invest a bit of time and effort. If you're not yet at the level of confidently writing functions, loops and vectorized alternatives in python or another language, I'd recommend starting with a different, more basic course because the learning curve with this one might be too steep.

Week 2 gives the ins and outs of pandas including creating and querying pandas series and data frames.

Week 3 covers merging data frames, grouping (groupby) with aggregation (agg), applying functions rowwise (apply), and pivoting data (pivot_table) etc. It also gives a whirlwind tour of date/time manipulation using pandas. numpy is also included.

Week 4 has some lectures on distributions and more on numpy. The week consists mainly of the main project assignment where 50% of points are given on data cleaning and munging (contents of weeks 1-3) and the other 50% of points are on modelling and hypothesis testing. It's quite a proper project in the sense that you're given a number of non-clean data files scraped from different places and a hypothesis to test. There are some additional instructions on what format of cleaned data to produce from the different files and what type of test to perform, but for the rest you're on your own.

By Xavier L G

Nov 18, 2016

This course was excellent. This course deviates from many garbage MOOC who only work with quiz and can not provide a real python coding challenge experience. Assignements are really tough. But my sense of progress is real.(I have struggled to identify such feel in many pytyhon MOOC). Jupyter base for everythjng is a fantatsic format(it even allows coding mobility betwwen my station at work and my home station through the coding on jupyter in the cloud) . My feedback nevertheless will point to some aspect in my experience and where I think you can improve.

Succeeding the assignement does not mean that we identified the most elegant way to apply all the knowledge of the course(lambdas,list comprehension, grouping..., apply) in our coding. Breaking that barrier is not easy for me unless we are forced at it and so my looping mind is often applied in assignments. A real correction with the answer need to be provided(this is what the real classroom would do, we managed to get to the answer but we could still learn more with an assisted correction just like what the real classroom would do.I understand that you are worry that the model will end up as copy paste on a webpage and will kill your value. You could maybe consider this add_on for paid customers only and only provide it in picture way which can only be paper print and not so easily converted to webpage format.Or you need to find an alegant way to randomize the assignment coding test at each coursera session, which in that case would not bring any forgery issue and you could provide the correction at the end of the course(or after each assigment completed).

Videos are a bit too fast on concepts sometimes.

You could split the assigment in two formats: format where simple principle of the course are first resolved on jupyter notebook (just like the videos case but with more exercices) and complex dataframe case as second assignment .(but please reduce the amounts of case to only 1 or 2, not 3)

You could reduce dataframe case.(I've spend easily 40 hours on assigment here, assigment time is too heavy from my workload as a full time scientist. This needs some carefull tuning.

Overall Great Job