This has been a challenging course for me, for whatever reasons. I have devoted a great deal of time in reading Dr. Peng's books as well as reviewing work product of other students to get a better grasp of the logic and methodology. I have enjoyed this course more than any of the preceding courses. And, the struggle I believe will be worth the effort and facilitate my completion of the data science specialization program.

This lesson could have been significantly improved if there was at least one assignment on clustering/dimensional reduction. Those are probably the hardest concepts thought thus far, so it would have been extremely useful to have at least one challenge to work through.

Once it got to the clustering section the lessons were inscrutable. Extremely difficult to understand and not explained well.

This course covers plotting (base, lattice, ggplot) then takes a confusing tour into heavy topics of clustering and dimension reduction, then flips back to coloring in charts. The order of the lectures is confusing and PCA/SVD needs more background, clearer explanation and treatment (gets covered a bit more later under regression). Assignments are good and swirl courses helped solidify the lectures.

This course is basically plotting with R and clustering/dimensionality reduction. There's is not enough emphasis on the later in my opinion. The final assignment focuses only on plotting, which is a shame.

Cons:

# Too much focus on hopelessly outdated R functions.

# Lectures are mostly powerpoint karaoke along the lines of "You can do that thing. And you can also do that other thing. And also you do this third thing" without much real-world application.

# ggplot2 is the only modern viz package that gets mentioned

Pros:

# The swirl exercises are great (but very buggy on Mac)

This is the worst of the Data Science courses so far (they've all been pretty good up to this point).

It's called Exploratory Data Analysis, but is actually all about the graphics systems in R. And it does a botched job on those as well.

All quizzes and assignments are about the graphics systems. The only portion of the course that deviates from that is Week 3 (for which there is no quiz or project) where we "learn" about clustering and dimension reduction. However, that material is presented really poorly: not enough depth for someone who is already familiar with the subject matter; and not nearly well enough explained for newbies.

On the graphics side, none of the systems is explored in great depth. The lattice system is essentially just mentioned in passing.

To cap it all off, the brief for the last assignment is really ambiguous, which often causes perfectly valid work to be graded poorly by peers. (Just look at the forums, if you need proof.)

Provides a solid overview of the base plotting system and a discussion (better elsewhere) of others. Introduces some higher level exploratory methods, without much information on either the theory or application (simply walks through the recipe). Assessments do not match the lecture material, so the credential is essentially meaningless. Read the associated book, watch the video lectures if you'd like. Don't bother with paying for the certificate.

The videos were merely repeating the content from swirl, with absolutely no added values.

This course mostly about how to use plotting libraries in R.

When it comes down to it, there's simply not the support to assist a student that has a really hard problem, "hacker mentality" seems to equate to "figure it out on your own cuz nobody's going to help you". If things do not work perfectly for you then you are likely never to be able to finish because your "peers" don't know any better either. The way this class is set up makes me angry every time I have to deal with it. I would probably be just as well served doing just the swirl() exercises. I would quit if I hadn't paid all the way through in advance. I can't believe this is the type of school John Hopkins is to produce a course of this quality, but I guess I have to.

Excellent and thank you very much!

good

Very useful course

great course

An excellent introduction to R' basic processing and graphing functionalities.

really interesting

I learned a lot from this course. Content which the course covers was a third of what I learnt from this course. the best thing about it is learning the pattern of thinking about exploring a whole new dataset.

This is a great course on plotting data as well as finding underlying patterns in it.

Fantastic way to learn graphing systems in R and exploratory analysis

I learned so much in this course.

awesome....

Very good content !

please provide some practical problems with answers to practise before attempting the assignments

The course is definitely useful for my job. I learned new skills and had fun!