Course Review – Graph Analytics for Big Data (Amarnath Gupta)

Here is my review for Graph Analytics for Big Data course offered on Coursera in Feb 2016. The course is ranked 2.5 out of 5, while I passed with 99.4% score.
Technologies/Material: The course provides introduction to graph theory with practical examples of graph analytics. Most of examples and homework is done in Neo4j, a leading graph database. The last assignment employs GraphX API in Spark. Since graph databases are so different from regular databases, the special graph query language called Cypher was developed to write code for Neo4j. Extensive Cypher tutorial and executable code samples grouped by topics are given. Graph analytics offers simple answers to many questions. The discussed graph techniques are Path Analytics, Dijkstra algorithm and its variations, Connectivity Analytics, Community Analytics, and Centrality Analytics.
Instructor/lectures: the course is taught by Amarnath Gupta, an Associate Director of San Diego Supercomputer Center. Amarnath is an amazing instructor. The course is well taught with just the right speed and the right amount of material given. In my view, he succeeded in making an introduction to graphs, while not oversimplifying the concepts.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *