Understanding Data Science (DataCamp)

Offered by DataCamp,
Understanding Data Science (DataCamp)

An introduction to data science with no coding involved. What is data science, why is it so popular, and why did the Harvard Business Review hail it as the “sexiest job of the 21st century”? In this non-technical course, you’ll be introduced to everything you were ever too afraid to ask about this fast-growing and exciting field, without needing to write a single line of code.

Class Deals by MOOC List - Click here and see DataCamp's Active Discounts, Deals, and Promo Codes.

Through hands-on exercises, you’ll learn about the different data scientist roles, foundational topics like A/B testing, time series analysis, and machine learning, and how data scientists extract knowledge and insights from real-world data. So don’t be put off by the buzzwords. Start learning, gain skills in this hugely in-demand field, and discover why data science is for everyone!

Chapter 1: Introduction to Data Science
We'll start the course by defining what data science is. We'll cover the data science workflow and how data science is applied to real-world problems. We'll finish the chapter by learning about different roles within the data science field.

Chapter 2: Data Collection and Storage
Now that we understand the data science workflow, we'll dive deeper into the first step: data collection and storage. We'll learn about the different data sources you can draw from, what that data looks like, how to store the data once it's collected, and how a data pipeline can automate the process.

Chapter 3: Preparation, Exploration, and Visualization
Data preparation is fundamental: data scientists spend 80% of their time cleaning and manipulating data, and only 20% of their time actually analyzing it. This chapter will show you how to diagnose problems in your data, deal with missing values and outliers. You will then learn about visualization, another essential tool to both explore your data and convey your findings.

Chapter 4: Experimentation and Prediction
In this final chapter, we'll discuss experimentation and prediction! Beginning with experiments, we'll cover A/B testing, and move on to time series forecasting where we'll learn about predicting future events. Finally, we'll end with machine learning, looking at supervised learning, and clustering.

Go to Class
MOOC List is learner-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Related Courses

Framework for Data Collection and Analysis (Coursera) Coursera
University of Maryland, College Park

Framework for Data Collection and Analysis (Coursera)

This course will provide you with an overview over existing data products and a good understanding of the data collection landscape. With the help of various examples you will learn how to identify which data sources likely matches your research question, how to turn your research question into measurable pieces, and how to think about an analysis plan.

Jun 8th 2026
4 Weeks
Machine Learning: Regression (Coursera) Coursera
University of Washington

Machine Learning: Regression (Coursera)

Case Study - Predicting Housing Prices. In our first case study, predicting house prices, you will create models that predict a continuous value (price) from input features (square footage, number of bedrooms and bathrooms,...). This is just one of the many places where regression can be applied. Other applications range from predicting health outcomes in medicine, stock prices in finance, and power usage in high-performance computing, to analyzing which regulators are important for gene expression.

Jun 8th 2026
5-12 Weeks
Measure and Optimize Social Media Marketing Campaigns (Coursera) Coursera
Facebook

Measure and Optimize Social Media Marketing Campaigns (Coursera)

This course provides you with the skills to optimize your social media marketing efforts. Learn to evaluate and interpret the results of your advertising campaigns. Learn how to assess advertising effectiveness through lift studies and optimize your campaigns with split testing. Understand how advertising effectiveness is measured across platforms and devices, learn how to evaluate the ROI of your marketing, and master how to communicate your social media marketing results to others in the company. By the end of this course, you will be able to: analyze dashboards and evaluate ROI from your social media marketing efforts; understand different techniques used to optimize marketing campaigns, such as attribution and marketing mix models; implement an A/B test to optimize your campaign; present and communicate the results of your campaign to a team.

Jun 9th 2026
4 Weeks
Introduction to Data Science in Python (Coursera) Coursera
University of Michigan

Introduction to Data Science in Python (Coursera)

This course will introduce the learner to the basics of the python programming environment, including fundamental python programming techniques such as lambdas, reading and manipulating csv files, and the numpy library. The course will introduce data manipulation and cleaning techniques using the popular python pandas data science library and introduce the abstraction of the Series and DataFrame as the central data structures for data analysis, along with tutorials on how to use functions such as groupby, merge, and pivot tables effectively. By the end of this course, students will be able to take tabular data, clean it, manipulate it, and run basic inferential statistical analyses.

Jun 8th 2026
4 Weeks
Communicating Data Science Results (Coursera) Coursera
University of Washington

Communicating Data Science Results (Coursera)

Making predictions is not enough! Effective data scientists know how to explain and interpret their results, and communicate findings accurately to stakeholders to inform business decisions. Visualization is the field of research in computer science that studies effective communication of quantitative results by linking perception, cognition, and algorithms to exploit the enormous bandwidth of the human visual cortex. In this course you will learn to recognize, design, and use effective visualizations.

Jun 8th 2026
3 Weeks
Introduction to Recommender Systems: Non-Personalized and Content-Based (Coursera) Coursera
University of Minnesota

Introduction to Recommender Systems: Non-Personalized and Content-Based (Coursera)

This course, which is designed to serve as the first course in the Recommender Systems specialization, introduces the concept of recommender systems, reviews several examples in detail, and leads you through non-personalized recommendation using summary statistics and product associations, basic stereotype-based or demographic recommendations, and content-based filtering recommendations.

Jun 8th 2026
4 Weeks
Python for Data Science, AI & Development (Coursera) Coursera
IBM

Python for Data Science, AI & Development (Coursera)

Kickstart your learning of Python for data science, as well as programming in general, with this beginner-friendly introduction to Python. Python is one of the world’s most popular programming languages, and there has never been greater demand for professionals with the ability to apply Python fundamentals to drive business solutions across industries.

Jun 9th 2026
5-12 Weeks
Practical Machine Learning (Coursera) Coursera
Johns Hopkins University

Practical Machine Learning (Coursera)

One of the most common tasks performed by data scientists and data analysts are prediction and machine learning. This course will cover the basic components of building and applying prediction functions with an emphasis on practical applications. The course will provide basic grounding in concepts such as training and tests sets, overfitting, and error rates.

Jun 8th 2026
4 Weeks