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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Statistical Inference by Johns Hopkins University

4.2
stars
4,424 ratings

About the Course

Statistical inference is the process of drawing conclusions about populations or scientific truths from data. There are many modes of performing inference including statistical modeling, data oriented strategies and explicit use of designs and randomization in analyses. Furthermore, there are broad theories (frequentists, Bayesian, likelihood, design based, …) and numerous complexities (missing data, observed and unobserved confounding, biases) for performing inference. A practitioner can often be left in a debilitating maze of techniques, philosophies and nuance. This course presents the fundamentals of inference in a practical approach for getting things done. After taking this course, students will understand the broad directions of statistical inference and use this information for making informed choices in analyzing data....

Top reviews

JA

Oct 25, 2018

Course is compressed with lots of statistical concepts. Which is very good as most must know concepts are imparted. Lots of extra reading is required to gain all insights. Very good motivating start .

RI

Sep 24, 2020

the teachers were awesome in this course. I liked this course a lot.Understood it properly.Thanks to all the beloved teachers and mentors who toiled hard to make these course easy to handle.Gracious!

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26 - 50 of 869 Reviews for Statistical Inference

By Ritwik V

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Jun 8, 2020

Nice course,enjoyed it the most till now out of previous courses of Data Science Specialization. But is tough for people from non-Statistics background. I am a Statistics Major and I have studied all these topic in great detail so I didn't need to watch much videos.

By Justin H

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Jun 13, 2021

Excellent course. Brian is a very good lecturer. Recommendation to students...as he's lecturing and showing you the R code, type it in yourself and get it to work. This makes the lectures take twice as long to get through, but it's 100% worth it.

By Long H

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Jan 31, 2016

I found this course really good introduction to statistical inference. I did find it quite challenging but I can go away from this course having a greater understanding of Statistical Inference

By Rebecca K

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Sep 3, 2018

The information is so important and useful, but I found the presentation of the material to be fast and not very interesting, and therefore it was hard for me to retain the material. I learned a lot, but I would need to invest a lot more time to realllyyy grasp everything in the course. It wasn't presented in a way that made it easy to learn, so I need to spend more time going back over things to really get it.

By Yang D

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Aug 16, 2018

There're lots of practice on manually construct statistics. I'm not sure if it's necessary to do that since we could just use R code to do it. I think how to interpret it and use these statistics in examples would be more important. There're some examples, but could be more and interpret more in depth if there were less focus on the calculation.

By Joana P

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Feb 22, 2018

I found that the materials given or the lectures never allow you to clearly follow a structure.

I understand that are so many contents to present, but jumping around from one to another is not the way.

Quite frequently a lot of the slides are just useless. Not all of us have the time to go behind every mathematics, so I would like to see more real examples of how to use the contents you teach us, than knowing all the mathematics and have a lot of slides to show how to deduct mathematically the probability of something to happen. But might be my opinion because I had other expectations.

By Ramesh N

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May 18, 2020

The material covered is quite a lot, but the course content is disorganized and the delivery is not engaging. At most, you can use videos and slides as a reference and learn from other sources (as I did).

By Huynh L D

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Jun 17, 2016

This course is tough, informative. Good for people who want a summary of all the statistical concepts you can use for data science. You'll get the most out of this course not by expecting it to be beginner, because it is not. This course is best supplemented by having background knowledge in statistics. Meaning, learners would be much better off if he/she did some statistical course before. This course will provide the practical experience of implementing statistical concepts in R.

By Boris K

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Oct 12, 2019

This is so far the most difficult course in the specialization, but also the most useful. In this course you are taught to think like a scientist, to test hypothesis and provide evidence for your analysis. The lectures are succint and clear, the quizzes are clever and useful and the final project will make you create a very beautiful report while doing scientific work, which is the reason I started studying data science in the first place!

By Angela W

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Oct 19, 2017

I really liked this course, especially the course project at the end - the second part felt like (a really simplified version of) a task one might actually have to do as a data scientist, and I liked that through this course and the previous ones, I knew exactly what I had to do. The course itself is pretty mathematical and I think intellectually the most challenging so far, especially since it's a lot of content for 4 weeks.

By Pankaj K

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Oct 16, 2018

This course covers the very basics of statistical inference which will help to strengthen your base concept. I loved doing the course especially the practice assignments on swirl.

Thanks.

By Anneke P

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Oct 24, 2021

This course will give you a good basic understanding of statistical inference. However, if you are a complete beginner I highly recommend first doing a basic statistics course (such as the one presented by the University of Amsterdam on coursera). Also, do use the recommended textbook and take your time to understand concepts. This course will also work better in context of other courses in the Data Science specialisation (for example R Programming and Exploratory Data Analysis). This course took me 4 months to complete with regular effort (not 4 weeks as suggested!), so factor in extra time for completion.

By Don M

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Feb 1, 2019

This is an excellent course, though it is fast-paced. I didn't have time to watch the lectures and also do the practice exercises in Swirl in the time allotted. As usual, the time estimates for completion are wonky. I ended up just watching the lectures and taking the tests, which is far from ideal (I am taking some time to do those valuable exercises now that the course is done). Although I got 100% in the course, I felt the learning experience could have been better as a result.

By Audun T H B

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Oct 1, 2019

Thorough course. A bit difficult to follow the lectures at times.

By Jared P

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Apr 10, 2017

I'm in the data science specialization. Statistical Inference was my 6th course. All of them have been on a spectrum of good to great. But Statistical Inference is a mixed bag for me.

First, if you are thinking about this course, take some time reading the other reviews. I find many of them resonate with my experience leading to 1/5 stars.

One reviewer who gave 5/5 stars said they loved the course. They suggested that other reviewers who gave low ratings are ones that dropped out. I don't find this to be the case. Many of the low rating reviewers actually did pass the course and said very similar things as those who did not pass the course.

Another reviewer enjoyed Brian's dry humour. I must have missed the jokes after watching each video 5 times...

For the record, I almost aced this course. The reason for not getting 100% was because I was so annoyed with one of the quizes that I didn't bother taking it again to correct it. I decided living with 8/10 correct questions was better than having a stroke while in the pursuit of two extra points. Yes, that is how much I hated this course.

The first 2 weeks of the course were the worst. I dropped out for about a month (because of life priorities). Then I couldn't get motivated. 1 month turned into 2 months, then into 3 months. I basically took the entire summer off. Finally I bit the bullet and completed the final 2 weeks. The 3rd week of the course wasn't actually all that bad (though the quiz was terrible). The 4th week felt like the first 2 weeks...terrible.

(By the way, it's a mistake to take such a long break. I had to re-watch the first videos to recall things for the remaining quizzes).

If you don't have some sort of statistical knowledge (or inherent aptitude), be prepared to work four times longer on the course. For all your quiz and assignment time-to-completion estimates, multiply them by 4 or more. Seriously, I spent probably 10 hours on the final assignment which said it should only take 2 hours. Each quiz took me an entire Sunday afternoon (My partner was not pleased).

Now here is where things get awkward. I hated the course .... BUT....I learned things that actually stuck. So in THAT regard, I give this course extra stars. It accomplished something that some University courses could not. I even found myself USING the new knowledge in real world problems. So ironically, is that not a sign that it's ...dare I say...a GOOD course?

Would I take the course again? I actually might, but ONLY because of its place in the overall certification. If you are a prospective student wondering if you should take the course as a standalone course, I don't think I could recommend it, because there are far better ways to learn. In fact, just doing the Swirl lessons could be good enough.

If you are a prospective student and you want the certification, then you'll HAVE to take the course. Why are you even bothering to read reviews?

So I'm giving the course 3/5 stars. If I gave it 1 or 2 stars, my review would be clustered with the majority. If I gave it 4 or 5 stars, I'd be lying.

By Andrew

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May 5, 2019

Not my favorite course in the series, but I did learn a lot. I highly recommend following along with the course book provided in the course. The videos alone are not enough. I also recommend printing out a sheet with statistical formulas to use (not provided from the course, but you can find easily on the web). The stat sheet with formula helped me connect all the dots and better understand when to use a formula.

By Mingda W

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Jun 5, 2018

My most recent experience with statistics was about 2 years ago, and it was college level statistics. Still, I find this class is hard to keep up sometimes. In general, I felt like the professor explaining too much on the mathematical meaning behind equations instead of talking about the real-world meaning of equation components, and why those calculation make sense.

By Stefan K

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May 2, 2020

I found the lectures hard to follow, they didn't help me one bit. If you get his book, read it, and do the exercises, you can save yourself some time.

By JiapengSun

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Dec 10, 2019

The materials offered from this course is far away enough from understand the content :(

By Robert K

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Apr 16, 2019

A lot of material to cover - can be a strain, but well explained for the most part.

By Tomasz S

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Jan 18, 2020

Very fast course... Additional reading required.

By Vincenc P

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Feb 11, 2016

I am left feeling this course needs work. I don't know if it's the pain of switching to the new platform or what, but the total lack of any support from the TA/instructor team is frustrating. Add to that the fact that Brian skips from slide to slide very quickly often not providing adequate explanations and you'll be re-watching the videos many times over.

Several of the videos have blatant errors in them, like the fast that the fourth video of a week also contains the entire third video... again.

Such things should not have passed a half decent QA test.

More than anything this specialization should not be marketed as "no previous experience needed". You need to know some statistics. And by some, I mean do the whole thing on Khan Academy first.

By Anant C

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May 6, 2020

The content of the course was well organized and structured, but the content delivery in the videos was terrible. I was unable to understand even the basic concepts from the professor due to his fragmented sentence structure, lack of lecture planning and an emphasis on evaluating R code more than on explaining the concept. I am now hesitant to go on to the next course in this specialization. The Swirl() exercises, however, were very thorough and did a good job in explaining the concepts.

By John M

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Sep 29, 2019

This course was very hard to complete. The lectures were harder to follow than the previous courses.

By Alexander D

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Jan 31, 2020

Wouldn't recommend for those learning stats. Try Duke's course instead. This one was poorly taught.