IIT Madras is now inviting engineering candidates for a free online course on data science for on the NPTEL platform. While the course is open to anyone concerned to learn the subject, it is most apt for computer science and engineering students. A 10 hours of pre-course material will be provided to learners who need to practice the same for making them ready to take the course in data science, as a pre-requisite for taking the course.

The free classes in data science will be conducted online by IIT Madras professors, Prof Rengaswamy and Prof Shankar Narasimhan who is a professor in the department of chemical engineering at the institute at present. Learners of the course are also eligible to earn a certificate from IIT Madras and NPTEL by paying a sum of Rs 1000 and clearing an examination to be conducted on 21 March 2021.

Learners of the course will be introduced to the following aspects of data science: R as a programming language, mathematical foundations required for data science, first-level data science algorithms, data analytics problem-solving framework, and practical capstone case study. The following are the topics that will be taught:

• Course philosophy and introduction to R.
• Linear algebra for data science and algebraic view – vectors, matrices, the product of matrix and vector, rank, null space, solution of over-determined; set of equations and pseudo-inverse; Geometric view – vectors, distance, projections, eigenvalue decomposition.
• Statistics (descriptive statistics, the notion of probability, distributions, mean, variance, covariance, covariance: matrix, understanding univariate and multivariate normal distributions, introduction to hypothesis testing, confidence; interval for estimates).
• Typology of data science problems and a solution framework.
• Simple linear regression and verifying assumptions used in linear regression, and multivariate linear regression, model assessment, assessing the importance of different variables, subset selection.
• Classification using logistic regression.
• Classification using kNN and k-means clustering.

Those who wish to register for the course are advised to go through the official page for more information. The course begins from 18 January 2021 onwards, and the last date to enroll is 25 January 2021. The course is 8 weeks long and will end on 12 March 2021.