EdX

Introduction to Computational Thinking and Data Science (edX)

Offered by MIT, MITx,
Introduction to Computational Thinking and Data Science (edX)

This course is an introduction to using computation to understand real-world phenomena. This course will teach you how to use computation to accomplish a variety of goals and provides you with a brief introduction to a variety of topics in computational problem solving. This course is aimed at students with some prior programming experience in Python and a rudimentary knowledge of computational complexity.

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You will spend a considerable amount of time writing programs to implement the concepts covered in the course. For example, you will write a program that will simulate a robot vacuum cleaning a room or will model the population dynamics of viruses replicating and drug treatments in a patient's body.
Topics covered include:

  • Plotting with the pylab package
  • Random walks
  • Probability, Distributions
  • Monte Carlo simulations
  • Curve fitting
  • Knapsack problem, Graphs and graph optimization
  • Machine learning basics, Clustering algorithms
  • Statistical fallacies

This course is part of theComputational Thinking using Python XSeries program.

What you'll learn:

  • Plotting with the pylab package
  • Stochastic programming and statistical thinking
  • Monte Carlo simulations

Prerequisites
6.00.1x - Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python or equivalent (some prior programming experience in Python and a rudimentary knowledge of computational complexity)

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