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Free Certificate in Data Mining/Analytics

admin — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 02:40:39 +0000

Analytics or data science has following components:

data mining/machine learning/statistics
data visualization
database management
programming

There are some free online courses that cover many of these areas, and these courses are usually part of a degree or a certificate program in data mining. Those who are new or interested in this field can learn a whole lot without paying a dime. Here is the list:

Intro to Probability and Statistics (Carnegie Mellon)
Machine Learning 101/102
GovData (MIT/Harvard)
STATS 120: Information Visualisation (The University of Auckland)
R Programming (UCLA)
CS 229: Machine Learning (Stanford) (videos)
Linguistics 420: Statistical Natural Language Processing (Georgetown)
SI 508: Networks: Theory and Application (University of Michigan)
CS 591: Data Mining (West Virginia University)
STATS 782: Computing for Statisticians (The University of Auckland)
6.867: Machine Learning (MIT)
Andrew Moore’s Slides on Statistical Data Mining Tutorials
Lots of tutorials (Data Mining Tools)
Capstone project: kaggle or kdd (for a bigger list see kdnuggets)

Some free text books:

In addition, there is an excellent thread on quora on how to become a data scientist that covers lot of things and is a very good resource on the practice of analytics.

Data-Information Visualization

admin — Thu, 21 May 2009 12:34:56 +0000

Ever since I read the book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, by Edward R. Tufte, I am captivated by the idea of creating good design while doing data analysis or dashboard building. Although Excel 2007 charts are much nicer than its previous births, I have started disliking Excel charts. I am even developing an eye for picking out the bad information pixels. Apart from Tufte’s books, these books have helped me immensely:

The Elements of Graphing Data, by William S. Cleveland
Information Dashboard Design, by Stephen Few

Administrators/executives neither have the time nor the patience to understand complicated data mining algorithms and its results, and when they don’t understand them most probably they will never go in “production.” Simple, yet informative, designs and charts have better chances of going in production, which I am sure every data miner longs for.

I found a course web-site on Information Visualization: http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~ihaka/120/lectures.html

Excel Books

admin — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 12:56:00 +0000

Books on my shelf:
Professional Excel Development by Stephen Bullen, Rob Bovey This is by far the most authoritative book on Excel development from Add-ins to APIs. A word of caution though, it is not for the beginners.
Excel Advanced Report Development by Timothy Zapawa Ever wondered on using Excel as a report development tool? This might be an answer to it; however, my problem with this book is that it focuses too much on pivottables, and because of that it doesn?t do justification to the name of the book. At any rate, this is very good book to exploit pivottable to its limits.
Excel 2007 Power Programming with VBA by John Walkenbach Of course, it cannot happen that you talk about Excel books and don?t mention Mr. Spreadsheet himself. I am his fan on personal and professional level. On personal level, I love his blog, and on professional level, I like his lucid language in his books. I recommend reading his books and blog both.
Excel 2003 Formulas by John Walkenbach You thought you knew formulas? Just read this book and you?ll realize, which I do almost every day, that there just so much about Excel that we don?t know. John uses simple language, and introduces the readers from basic to advanced formulas. How advance you might ask, well, here is an example, which uses a formula similar to this:
Excel 2007 Formulas by John Walkenbach
Books I have Read:
Data Analysis and Decision Making with Microsoft Excel by S. Christian Albright I borrowed this book from the library. It is a very good for beginners.
Excel 2003 Power Programming with VBA by John Walkenbach
Integrating Excel and Access by Michael Schmalz I borrowed this book from the library too. Excellent reference on developing applications using Access, Excel, and VBA.
Mr Excel ON EXCEL by Bill Jelen This is my first book I read on Excel, which is written by Bill Jelen aka Mr. Excel. Fantastic book. If you have begun knowing Excel just now, obtain a copy of this book right away. This is the right start for beginners. It uses very simple and clear language, and Bill provides great examples to make the learning useful.
Guerilla Data Analysis Using Microsoft Excel by Bill Jelen I had an e-version of this book, but for some reason it’s not working anymore. I had chewed on this book a lot. It?s a great book for starters, especially, in data crunching.