Course Preview | Professional Certificate in Data Science and Analytics from MIT xPRO

Hello and welcome to the Professional Certificate in Data Science Program. I'm Vivek Farias. I'm the Patrick McGovern Professor at the MIT Sloan School. My research runs the gamut but basically I've spent my entire life working with data and more importantly trying to extract value from data and that's kind of the purpose of the class. Okay. So, this class is about getting you to appreciate the strategic significance of data in modern decision making. Okay. And so, we will strive to equip you with the tools necessary to look at data and to look at business decisions and understand how to use data to inform these business decisions so that we make better decisions and extract economic value. That's kind of the high-level objective that sort of motivates us. Now in doing this, as I said, there'll be a number of tools we learn along the way. So first off, we'll start very simple things like linear regression and visualization and clustering and we'll work our way up to making sure that you understand the latest and greatest of what's going on in deep learning. Okay. We'll get you to understand all of those tools. A lot of these things we learn by actually doing and so through the course we'll be using Python within the Google Colab Framework to get you to essentially use these tools to understand how they work. But again, more importantly the goal is to get you to look at data and business decisions side by side and to understand how this data might be used to make better business decisions. Now, I can't do this alone and so joining me will be my colleagues Retsef Levi, Robert Freund, and Rama Ramakrishnan. We each actually share this view of making sure that you understand the strategic importance, the strategic relevance that data actually has in modern business. With that, I hope you enjoy this program.