This course is a mess. I worked a lot with R before - mostly self taught. So my motivation of taking this course was that I wanted to get an official certificate proving my knowledge. Generally speaking, while the way they code here in this course may be fine for little projects, it will cause you to experience issues in bigger ones, because it is highly inefficient - mainly through unnecessarily defining new data frames in each and every step. When coding this way, you will get very high run times if you work with even slightly larger data sets, and frankly, chances are you may be not able to grasp your own code at some point when working more complex projects. Secondly, you will at several points encounter stuff that does not work properly - e.g. some codes in the labs, the link to the data set for the assingment. This was quite frustrating, honestly. Overall, I spend more time setting up their IBM-own Watson studio than on any practice lab. Do people at IBM think, that making us use Watson studio for their courses will lead to people actually deciding to pay for that service in the long run? Concerning data analysis projects - after this brief look - I would say RStudio offers by far a better environment. Third, the statistical concepts are poorly explained. If you already have good knowledge of those topics and only search for a way to get certified you might be pleased by the pace. But good luck if you don't. In some ways, one might think it is quite arrogant to think that one can explain complex topics like overfitting/underfitting/L1- and L2-penalties and their implications, which are handled in several lectures in real courses, by using 2-3 videos of less than 10 minutes. I did not understand, why this was even discussed in this course, especially after seeing how superficially regression models were presented. I am not sure if the instructors even have a good understanding of the mathematics in place here. Overall this course fulfilled my personal objective, but I would highly recommend not enrolling in this course if your knowledge on the topics discussed in this course is not already sufficient.

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