Tag: course

Bayesian Statistics using R, Python, and Stan

For a year now, this course on Bayesian statistics has been on my to-do list. So without further ado, I decided to share it with you already.

Richard McElreath is an evolutionary ecologist who is famous in the stats community for his work on Bayesian statistics.

At the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Richard teaches Bayesian statistics, and he was kind enough to put his whole course on Statistical Rethinking: Bayesian statistics using R & Stan open access online.

You can find the video lectures here on Youtube, and the slides are linked to here:

Richard also wrote a book that accompanies this course:

For more information abou the book, click here.

For the Python version of the code examples, click here.

How to Speak – MIT lecture by Patrick Winston

Patrick Winston was a professor of Artificial Intelligence at MIT. Having taught with great enthusiasm for over 50 years, he passed away past June.

As a speaker [Patrick] always had his audience in the palm of his hand. He put a tremendous amount of work into his lectures, and yet managed to make them feel loose and spontaneous. He wasn’t flashy, but he was compelling and direct.
Peter Szolovits via http://news.mit.edu/2019/patrick-winston-professor-obituary-0719

I’ve written about Patrick’s MIT course on Artificial Intelligence before, as all 20+ lectures have been shared open access online on Youtube. I’ve worked through the whole course in 2017/2018, and it provided me many new insights into the inner workings of common machine learning algorithms.

Now, I stumbled upon another legacy of Patrick that has been opened up as of December 20th 2019. A lecture on “How to Speak” – where Patrick explains what he think makes a talk enticing, inspirational, and interesting.

Patrick Winston’s How to Speak talk has been an MIT tradition for over 40 years. Offered every January, the talk is intended to improve your speaking ability in critical situations by teaching you a few heuristic rules.
https://ocw.mit.edu/resources/res-tll-005-how-to-speak-january-iap-2018/

That’s all I’m going to say about it, you should have a look yourself! If you don’t apply these techniques yet, do try them out, they will really upgrade your public speaking effectiveness:

Finland’s free online AI crash course

Finland developed a crash course on AI to educate its citizens. The course was arguably a great local success, with over 50 thousand Fins taking the course (1% of the population).

Now, as a gift to the European Union, Finland has opened up the course for the rest of Europe and the world to enjoy.

All pictures are screenshots taken from the website

The course is even being translated into several local languages. At the time of writing, five Northern European languages are already supported, but additional translation efforts are still in progress.

Elements of AI takes six weeks and functions as a crash course and beginner introduction to the field of AI:

Generalized Additive Models Tutorial in R, by Noam Ross

Generalized Additive Models — or GAMs in short — have been somewhat of a mystery to me. I’ve known about them, but didn’t know exactly what they did, or when they’re useful. That came to an end when I found out about this tutorial by Noam Ross.

In this beautiful, online, interactive course, Noam allows you to program several GAMs yourself (in R) and to progressively learn about the different functions and features. I am currently halfway through, but already very much enjoy it.

If you’re already familiar with linear models and want to learn something new, I strongly recommend this course!

The interactive course asks you to program several GAMs yourself https://noamross.github.io/gams-in-r-course/

You progressively learn how to run, interpret, and visualize GAMs yourself https://noamross.github.io/gams-in-r-course/

After a while you are even able to visualize smoothed interactions between variables https://noamross.github.io/gams-in-r-course/

(Time Series) Forecasting: Principles & Practice (in R)

I stumbled across this open access book by Rob Hyndman, the god of time series, and George Athanasopoulos, a colleague statistician / econometrician at Monash University in Melbourne Australia.

Hyndman and Athanasopoulos provide a comprehensive introduction to forecasting methods, accessible and relevant among others for business professionals without any formal training in the area. All R examples in the book assume work build on the fpp2 R package. fpp2 includes all datasets referred to in the book and depends on other R packages including forecast and ggplot2.

Some examples of the analyses you can expect to recreate, ignore the agricultural topic for now ; )

Monthly milk production per cow. — One of the example analysis you will recreate by following the book (Figure 3.3)

Forecasts of egg prices using a random walk with drift applied to the logged data. — You will be forecasting price data using different analyses and adjustments (Figure 3.4)

I highly recommend this book to any professionals or students looking to learn more about forecasting and time series modelling. There is also a DataCamp course based on this book. If you got value out of this free book, be sure to buy a hardcopy as well.

Predictive HR Analytics

Tilburg University has set up a masterclass Predictive HR Analytics. In 3 days, the Professional Learning program will teach you all you need to know to implement predictive analytics and take HR to the next level. More information can be found here.

What makes this program unique?

The masterclass Predictive HR Analytics goes beyond HR analytics and focuses on transformational people predictions. You learn how to embed predictive HR analytics into your HR Strategy and how to use your findings to convince others.
The masterclass is developed at the prestigious Human Resources department at Tilburg University, which has obtained international recognition with its high-quality academic research in the HRM field.
The mix of professors in conjunction with leading HR professionals leads to a strong academic program with a practical approach.
Your peer participants will make sure that the class opens up a high-quality network of HR specialists. The diversity of leading companies from different sectors in the classroom creates new insights for all the participants.
The program is like a 3-day pressure cooker. By combining online and offline components, we can create more in-depth discussions in the classroom.
You will experience a high impact on your daily practice, since the program is focused on direct implementation.

Your profile

This course is ideal for anyone in HR seeking to become more adept in using quantitative data for decision making. Typical participants are (future) HR analysts, HR managers, HR business partners, HR consultants and (financial) business analysts with a strong link on people resources. Participants are from various sectors, such as financial services, healthcare institutions, government agencies and business services.