MIT The Analytics Edge Review

MIT’s The Analytics Edge is an edX course focused on using statistical tools to gain insight about data and make predictions. The majority of the course teaches analytic methods using the R programming language, but the final 2 weeks deal with solving optimization problems using spreadsheet software (LibreOffice or MS Excel). The course runs 11 weeks and covers R basics, linear regression, logistic regression, decision trees, text analytics, clustering, visualizations and both linear and integer optimizations.

The Analytics Edge is a meaty course. It has a lot of content each week and it’s not easy to breeze through things like it is with many other MOOCs. There are graded quizzes after each video lecture and each week of new material has 4 fairly lengthy case studies to complete. One week is devoted to an analytics competition while the final week is reserved for a 4 part final exam. Some students on the forums claimed they were spending 10 to 15 hours a week on this course. Coming into the course with basic knowledge of statistics and R helps a lot. It should be noted, however, that this course is not too math intensive. It doesn't spend a lot of time talking about formulas or nitty-gritty mathematical details; it mostly teaches you how to apply statistical functions and methods and interpret the results.

Although this course requires a serious time commitment, it is time well spent. The Analytics edge is an excellent course that teaches a bunch of practical statistical tools and actually gives you enough practice using them through the lengthy homework exercises to gain some confidence with them and remember how to use them. Too many courses info dump syntax and concepts, but don’t back them up with practical problems to let you use what you've learned. The homework problems for this course are very well crafted and look at a variety of interesting data sets from basketball stats to tweets about Apple. I can’t even imagine the amount of time that went into putting all the homework exercises together; kudos to the team at MIT for their hard work.

If you’re interested in learning some practical analytic methods that don’t require a ton of math background to understand, this is the course for you.

I give it 5 out of 5 stars: Excellent.