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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Machine Learning with Python by IBM

4.7
stars
15,281 ratings

About the Course

Get ready to dive into the world of Machine Learning (ML) by using Python! This course is for you whether you want to advance your Data Science career or get started in Machine Learning and Deep Learning. This course will begin with a gentle introduction to Machine Learning and what it is, with topics like supervised vs unsupervised learning, linear & non-linear regression, simple regression and more. You will then dive into classification techniques using different classification algorithms, namely K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), decision trees, and Logistic Regression. You’ll also learn about the importance and different types of clustering such as k-means, hierarchical clustering, and DBSCAN. With all the many concepts you will learn, a big emphasis will be placed on hands-on learning. You will work with Python libraries like SciPy and scikit-learn and apply your knowledge through labs. In the final project you will demonstrate your skills by building, evaluating and comparing several Machine Learning models using different algorithms. By the end of this course, you will have job ready skills to add to your resume and a certificate in machine learning to prove your competency....

Top reviews

FO

Oct 8, 2020

I'm extremely excited with what I have learnt so far. As a newbie in Machine Learning, the exposure gained will serve as the much needed foundation to delve into its application to real life problems.

RC

Feb 6, 2019

The course was highly informative and very well presented. It was very easier to follow. Many complicated concepts were clearly explained. It improved my confidence with respect to programming skills.

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2401 - 2425 of 2,670 Reviews for Machine Learning with Python

By Malte H

•

Jan 11, 2021

PRO: Good overview and basic introduction of common machine learning techniques.

CON:

- The final assignment is peer reviewed! I saw no mention of this before purchasing the course. This means you are at the mercy of other students who may have less experience than you and may notbe qualified in grading assignments. Also it may mean you have to wait a long time before you get your certificate. It would be better to implement a Kaggle-style assessment of the models and use that to obtain a score and turn that into a grade. This would be transparent and instantaneous.

Some of the forum answers provided by the teaching staff are half baked and often inconsistent. e.g. they give example code for making a figure and and also a figure. But the figure is obviously not made with the provided code and the code contains typos. This is frustrating and makes learning harder than it should be.

Some of the code in the lab exercises don’t obey good practices. e.g. in every lab the data is normalised before train/test splitting. In the final project there is a comment that this should be done the other way around (and it really should!). Why not do it the right way in all the examples throughout the course?

By Isabel L

•

Apr 9, 2021

The course provides a good overview of the topic over 5 weeks plus the project week. With previous knowledge of Python, the coding is easy to follow. The videos are good. However, the Python Jupyter notebooks provided could be significantly improved. The content could be of better quality and more rigorous. The notebooks have many spelling mistakes, few explanations, unnecessary imports, a few bits of code that are incorrect and need to be fixed, some unnecessary or incorrect statements, etc. Some of the exercises proposed in the notebooks are meaningless for learning. Better practice tasks could be thought. Different notebook parts are clearly written by different people with different coding styles, which can sometimes be confusing for the learner. The assessment (classifier of loan repayment data) could also be improved as it was confusing in terms of what data sets should be used for training and testing. Peer-review is perhaps not the best for assessment grading either. Overall I enjoyed it and learnt, it's a good first impression of the subject but I would have expected higher quality of the materials from IBM - Coursera. Also, it would be good if notes or slides were provided.

By Thierry C

•

Feb 5, 2022

This course is pretty dense in mathematics concepts for evident reasons but there is a lot of repeat on "beyond the scope of this course" so maybe, the course should focus more on what they want to teach. This is the ninth course I took as part off the IBM professional curriculum and they all are formatted in the same way: the videos explains the concept in simple terms but you are left alone with the hands-on labs where you mostly learn nothing as you just execute the cells one by one until the end where you have to GUESS what should be written when the solution is not in the notebook. Now, during the whole length of this course, the labs are focused on how to create the different algorithms with an abrupt ending but the final submission leaves you having to come back to the week 3 trying to understand how to APPLY the models on another dataset. Given the global level of these courses which is supposed to be targetting beginners, I found the last submission to be harsh and from what I have read for the next course of the curriculum, the next one is even worse.

By Norma L

•

Oct 26, 2020

There are some labs that are amazing (towards the end) with all the steps explanations and all, but there are others full of errors, without answers, without explanations.

Even the sample notebook for grading your peers is wrong when it uses the split X_train, y_train for training the set after having found the best K, but then as well for all the other algorithms, and in a 1 year old post even a teaching staff agrees with this.

Also final lab is not properly explained leading to people not understanding what they need to do and resulting in very poor final projects

I´ve enjoyed the course anyway, because I´m more than capable of see what´s an error and what´s not and to find my way through all the flaws by digging in the internet and all, and because I love the subject

But given that we pay for the training, and many of this errors have been highlighted for months and even more than 1 year, I dont get this not being sorted.

Also the lack of support of the teaching staff has been amazing...

By Fuxia J

•

Dec 10, 2020

The video lectures are informative and rich in information. Generally speaking the labs have way more glitches than the previous courses that I've taken as part of the professional certificate program. As I can see from the discussion forums, many of the issues had been raised more than 2 years ago, yet there did not seem to be effort to fix them for the newer students. Although teaching staff was able to answer some questions, it took a lot of struggle and waste of time to figure out things. I strongly recommend the teachers and/or the teaching staff periodically and more frequently review and update any issues that are raised both in the discussion forums. I did learn a lot from the course but expected a better learning experience!!! Thank you!

By Piyush G

•

Feb 8, 2019

Though this course is a good introduction to machine learning concepts, but i believe it was a little superficial about the inner working of the core concepts( evades the relevant mathematics on many occasions).

What you will learn: An overview of the working of various elementary ML algorithms from data wrangling to implementation.

What you won't learn: The maths behind various learning techniques.

Suggestions to improve: Implementation of the Algorithms from scratch, emphasizing the mathematical background of each technique would help a lot to the first time learner, though it might narrow down the target audience a bit, but would be much beneficial to those who are willing to put some extra hours to brush up those requirements at their own end.

By Alexey K

•

Jan 23, 2023

A quick summary of all classical ML algorithms. Quality video content and quizzes, but severely lacks hands-on projects.

All Jupyter labs are optional and are of "click-through" or "copy-and-paste" nature with no need to write your own code and experiment, which takes away a huge learning opportunity. And there is no auto-grading for your code either.

Makes you wonder for how long will one be able to retain the acquired knowledge without any substantial practice.

Additional notes: although this course in particular is not too bad, I highly advise not taking this specialization due to later courses (#3 in particular) being almost useless. The lack of graded coding practice will make you retain almost no knowledge or practical skills.

By Areeb A

•

Aug 6, 2020

This course excellently explained the mathematical and theoretical foundations behind some of the machine learning algorithms, but how to program these algorithms in Python was not explained in the videos and it was left to the viewers to learn themselves in coding assignments, which is the disadvantage of this course. I was just able to do it because I previously had learnt upto some extent from some other websites.

So my advice is that if you still want to take this course, then after learning python, learn python libraries of Pandas, Numpy, Scipy and Matplotlib, and after that learn the sklearn libraries along with some theoretical background, and after that enroll in this course.

By Venkat N N

•

Dec 31, 2020

Course provides a good introduction to different machine learning algorithms, how they work and when they can be used. Prior math knowledge will be more helpful in following algorithms and understand each of the algorithms in detail, though it is not necessary since libraries implement the same. Labs were power packed and contain a lot of code that is not covered in this course. Labs assume prior python knowledge with some of libraries used.

Overall i enjoyed the course, but had to look up online to understand some of the concepts explained and also more detailed comments in the labs would have been helpful.

By Muhammad A S

•

May 27, 2020

The difference between teaching and taking quizzes and final coding assignment is too big because you make it optional to see the coding in the lectures and in final assignment you give a huge assignment which is technically not equivalent to the teaching process. So, my advice is that please make the lectures more attentive or make the programming exercises more compulsory and more suggestion and hints to understand it better, so that we can actually do the final assignment on our own. I have completed 8 courses of IBM Data Science specialization, believe me I have faced this issue in almost all of them.

By Aime L A

•

Feb 24, 2021

The videos are fantastic at explaining the concepts, and all the practical work is in the lab (sometimes there's no overlap in content other than the subject). However, the forum is mostly useless as there are few answers by staff, and a couple answers are links to other forums where you still have to figure out what the answer is among the posted discussions. Some of the labs have broken links or deprecated code. The final assignment is a nightmare, the instructions are very general so while not hard you can get to the final results in multiple ways and therefore peer grading is complicated at best.

By Max N

•

Nov 18, 2021

Excellent course material and labs, but using IBM Watson for the final project was unacceptable. Watson required multiple attempts at "identity verification" with a credit card, and the permalink that it provided was for an earlier (incomplete) version of the final project. It would be better to have a more robust and simplified system for such a critical part of the course. I would also add that the instructions for the final project could be much better.

By Niko J

•

May 18, 2020

Great course for learning ML with Python BUT includes surprisingly many mistakes and typos. Even in the final test there are very misleading copy/paste type of error in the description of the assignment. And many students in the forum have point out those mistakes already two years ago. Not fixing those clear and well reported errors is weird move from the creators and stops me giving more than 3/5 for otherwise superb course.

By Eric G

•

Dec 4, 2019

The parts on regression are previously covered in other courses that are part of the IBM Data Science professional certificate. Overall, there is a lot of information covered in this course but it feels rushed and done in not enough depth. It is an ok course for an overview of machine learning methods, but sits in a weird spot of trying to be too broad while being detailed, but too shallow for a rigorous study of each method.

By Alex M

•

Jul 21, 2020

I understand that this is a higher level course, so it may be designed in such a way to require learners to take bigger leaps, but I did not feel the explanations of what was required on the final were very clear, and once I graded other people's finals, it was clear that it was not clear for almost anyone.

Not a terrible course, the material and the topics were good, but better explanations are needed, I think.

By Vimal O

•

Nov 9, 2021

On overall IBM data science professional certificate track: Pros: Content is just good enough, instructors are good. Cons: IBM watson and the platform given to practise on is awful and has terrible performance and reliability issues, most often doesnt work and had an impact on my test deliverables. I personally overcame those issues to some extent with kaggle's and google colab jupyter notebook environments.

By greengoosepumpkin

•

Feb 14, 2022

There needs to be significant proofreading done on this course by a native English speaker. Additionally, the functionality of IBM tools (Watson Studio, Skills Lab, etc.) leaves quite a lot to be desired. The free tier services and trial accounts often do not work and, thus, you are stuck upgrading to a pay-as-you-go account to finish. The final course project requires some untaught ml skills.

By Advaith G

•

Sep 21, 2020

While the course does give a pretty good introduction to the concepts behind most machine learning algorithms and enables us to realize how ML works, the problem lies in the code. None of the code is explained in detail, so the course is extremely theoretical. It basically tells you to copy the code for your own use with small edits but does not explain how to write the code in the first place.

By Ankur G

•

May 18, 2020

A good course to learn know-how of Machine Learning using Python language so as to facilitate analysis and visualization of data to make effective decisions. I thank the professors to make this course interesting and worth it. Only thing is, videos can be made in a better way so as to facilitate people with non programming background. Maybe some basics of programming would help.

By Harry T

•

Jul 14, 2020

Good introduction, but not complete.

The course does well in introducing Machine Learning, and covers a good range of classification algorithms. However I feel doesn't go the full length. The labs very briefly cover implementation but I find that it falls short. There's a lack of polish in the material, while typos are minor, the labs are can be jarring and hard to follow.

By Nguyen H

•

Aug 15, 2022

While the videos are very intuitive and helpful, the assignments are lacking in providing machine learning coding skills. Many labs are simply reading others' code, which may be a bit helpful but I doubt if students can come up with the code for other similar problems. I expected better technical skills coming out of hands-on labs and projects from this course.

By Nicolas F G

•

Apr 6, 2021

The course gives a useful insight into machine learning algorithms and model creation using the python library sklearn. I liked the content, even though a little bit more mathematical background would have been nice. The exercises were good, but there was much of it already written in advance for us to use, so I didn't learn as much as I would have liked to.

By Sergio T

•

Jul 15, 2020

The course presents a useful overview of basic machine learning techniques without going into mathematical detail. The weekly test questions can be improved to assess the non-qualitative aspects of the topics covered. Using scikit-learn is well illustrated by labs using Jupyter Notebooks. There is plenty of room to update and improve the contents.

By Chetan K D

•

Jan 12, 2021

Overall, I found this course to be enriching. However, there were more than a few errors and unclear directions in instructions for the final assignment. I hope that the course team is/will update the assignment instructions so that they are in line with current version of the required libraries and will make the instructions more precise.

By Sean D

•

Feb 10, 2020

Very much enjoyed the course and am thankful for the great content, however the peer-grading process created some unnecessary headaches. On how to improve this I posted in the forum here: https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning-with-python/discussions/weeks/6/threads/JmWRnLUqSfClkZy1Kinw6Q

Thank you nonetheless for a great course!