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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Guided Tour of Machine Learning in Finance by New York University

3.8
stars
666 ratings

About the Course

This course aims at providing an introductory and broad overview of the field of ML with the focus on applications on Finance. Supervised Machine Learning methods are used in the capstone project to predict bank closures. Simultaneously, while this course can be taken as a separate course, it serves as a preview of topics that are covered in more details in subsequent modules of the specialization Machine Learning and Reinforcement Learning in Finance. The goal of Guided Tour of Machine Learning in Finance is to get a sense of what Machine Learning is, what it is for and in how many different financial problems it can be applied to. The course is designed for three categories of students: Practitioners working at financial institutions such as banks, asset management firms or hedge funds Individuals interested in applications of ML for personal day trading Current full-time students pursuing a degree in Finance, Statistics, Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics, Engineering or other related disciplines who want to learn about practical applications of ML in Finance Experience with Python (including numpy, pandas, and IPython/Jupyter notebooks), linear algebra, basic probability theory and basic calculus is necessary to complete assignments in this course....

Top reviews

LP

Oct 22, 2021

Very useful course. Personally, I think that there should have been more focus on the implementation of tensorflow and neural network codes. Overall the course is well structured and very clear.

KD

Aug 23, 2019

Introduction of ML for Financial application with combination of Scikit learn, Statsmodels and Tensorflow with neuralnets made this class very interesting. Learned and Enjoyed lot.

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176 - 200 of 206 Reviews for Guided Tour of Machine Learning in Finance

By Conan H

Sep 27, 2018

Interesting overview let down by lack of clarity on exercises such as the exact formulae and expected format of the outputs.

By Joao B

Mar 15, 2021

The grading system is broken and doesn't display any info in regards to what is wrong with your solution.

By Zicheng X

Sep 11, 2018

I faced some technique issue with submitting assignment. I hope there would be some technic help.

By Abhinav C

Feb 16, 2020

Was expecting bit more indepth. Very poor exercises with no reference to lectures. Disappointed.

By Simon N

Dec 1, 2020

No feedback from tutor in forum. Exercises confusing without much value.

By Quentin V

Jul 29, 2018

The automatic grading system does not work.

By Sean H

Jul 31, 2018

The material is promising, but the staff running the course do not give a lot of direction on how to pursue learning the content. The programming assignments are left almost completely to the students guessing what they're suppose to do with little direction. There is almost no feedback on how your code has performed, except to say that your code was wrong, which you already understand from not getting the points. While I was able to achieve a passing grade in this course and the next, it was only because of the community of students that figured things out together, but with no other reliable way of figuring the material out. The code was also rife with bugs that weren't fixed for weeks while students tried and failed over and over again to pass assignments that they simply could not pass. It ended up wasting many hours of my time and, no doubt, other students' time. Simply check the forums to see the frustration from the Coursera community, that normally expects and receives high quality educational content.

By Mike B

May 10, 2021

This course is frustrating and should not be taken. This is due to errors that make it impossible to complete the course.

Currently (2021-05) the IPy notebooks have bugs that either need to be debugged (week 2) or outright settings errors that prevent them from being graded.

Putting aside the errors, the coverage of ML in finance is good, but not great. Too verbose with long explanations before any examples or visuals are given. The few visuals are just static equations too. Igor fails to write on the equations as he talks, making it hard to follow and (in the 1st several weeks) never references code, just the few equations.

Worse, the quizzes embedded in the videos are sometimes asking about info that's covered later in the same video ... but Coursera doesn't let you continue further in the video until passing the quiz. Plus, the content in the 1st three weeks uses TF 1 and has not been updated to use the TF 2 version in Coursera's current notebooks.

By Ngọc T

Oct 4, 2018

Instructions completely unclear.Variables are named term1 and term2 with no reference to which formula. Not only is this not a unique decomposition (I could write this as 4 terms or 1 term depending on the algebra), but it is terrible coding practice.Covers material and requires knowledge of things never even discussed in the course. If this is done, it should be walked through pedagogically. This is for educational purposes after all. This assignment really seems like someone just wrote a jupyter notebook going through this calculation and erased a few random lines then expected us to be able to read their minds as to what was there.

By Ken H

Mar 8, 2022

Forums are dead. No one associated with the creation of the course has posted in years. Version of TensorFlow is outdated in the notebooks. If you want to work locally you will have to either find a way to install TensorFlow 1.x or port the notebooks to TensorFlow 2. The lab are frustrating but not because of the material. There are a lot version and notebook related issues that eat up your free time. I also don't like the way that the auto grader works. It is different from all other coursera course that I have taken. The difference is not helpful. The conent and assignments need to be updated for current best practices.

By Casey C

Aug 18, 2018

I am incredibly disappointed with this course. The subject material seems extremely interesting, and I couldn't wait to go through the course, but the graded programming assignments are terrible. They are vague to the point of impossible - the only way to pass them is to read the discussion forums and find a solution that has worked or guess and check. They cover material and techniques not even mentioned or referenced anywhere in the lectures or instructions. Worst of all, is these issues have been left unaddressed by the administrators for months despite students repeatedly voicing their concerns.

By Nicolas B

Apr 3, 2021

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, no clear instructions or explanations. (by the way, based on and old version of tensorflow with a different API). The exercises don't explain where the data comes from or what it represents or what output the grader expects (as in which variables your code is supposed to fill in). Wasted an amazing amount of time on trial and error instead of learning about finance or tensorflow.

The lectures seems to have been cut and pasted from another course: the speaker would say "welcome to week 2" on week 4, etc.

By Hussein H

Jan 25, 2020

The name of the course is what caused me to purchase, I was super excited for this course up until i reached the coding assignment. The instructions we practically not succinct whatsoever and i literally had no clue what it was asking and how to even start. From the discussions and reviews it appears alot of people have this same issue.

By Ehsan F

Jan 18, 2020

It is neither good for the beginners nor for advanced users. Specially on the finance side it's almost useless. People don't come here so you send them to read several different books. They come here so you teach them what they would find in those books. That's the actual added value and the service you are supposed to provide.

By Alvaro R

Jan 23, 2022

The course is very bad in explaining the tensorflow library, also there are no jupyter notebooks to practice, the teacher does not explain programming or mathematics in detail assuming that all students are experts in mathematics or have a Phd degree. Worst coursera course.

By Pierre C D M

Oct 14, 2018

The assignements do not match the content of the video therefore you are not able to test whether you understood the material or not. Basically it is better to buy the book "Hands on machine Learning" by Geron and work on Financial exam

By Amir T K

Apr 12, 2019

The teaching quality is poor and lacks practical examples. It is too technical, which you don't expect for this kind of courses. The mathematics were presented poorly and sometimes without context.

By P E

Mar 3, 2020

Utterly pointless. The in-video questions were terrible - they didn't test knowledge and were often irrelevant ("Lets move on and learn tensorflow" should *never* be an answer to a question).

By wasif.masood

Sep 6, 2018

This guys uses so difficult language to explain which to me looks like as if he himself does not really know what he is teaching. This is really annoying. The course outline is good though.

By Amin D

Dec 6, 2021

Worst course I have seen in coursera so far. Questions in assignments are not explained well. You need to have advanced knowledge and also you should figure out the questions by yourself.

By Luis P

Jan 28, 2021

Horrible assignments. No help from TAs whatsoever. Zero finance explanation. And the machine learning content (tensorflow in particular) is outdated, nobody uses Tensorflow 1.0...

By Boris S

Aug 21, 2018

Totally useless course. The professor has no idea how to teach. I recommend to take a good course in machine learning and a good course in finance instead this one.

By Deleted A

Jul 31, 2018

The course content is okay but the assignments are so poorly designed and no one responds to the questions on Week3 assignment #5.

By Martin M

Jul 19, 2021

Very difficult and boring to understand the instructor. Almost like a robot reading through a transcript.

By Ryland M

Aug 8, 2018

horrendous on all fronts. so disappointed. hoping the next course in specialization is better.