Course Review – Machine Learning with Big Data (Natasha Balac, Paul Rodriguez)

Here is my review for Machine Learning with Big Data course offered on Coursera in Jan 2016. The course got 2.0 out of 5 rankings and I passed it with 100% score.
Technologies/Material: The course provides basic theory and some exercises on popular machine learning techniques after presenting business justification and ML pipeline. The presented techniques are decision trees, association rules, and clustering. Exercises are largely done in KNIME with some parts in Apache Spark. Thankfully, the course has copyable code samples and provides basic information on how to get started with KNIME. The assignments require digging into non-trivial details of KNIME from its documentation/Internet/forums. For me the course provided valuable insights and examples of decision trees and association rules, which not many other courses offer.
Instructor/lectures: The course is taught by Natasha Balac, who provides most of business background, and Paul Rodriguez, who is a technical person. The presentation is organized better than in previous courses, though the depth of the material is often not sufficient for solid learning. Some slides can be reused to present Big Data to managers.

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