Data Science Capstone

Overall, I was semi-satisfied with the capstone project:

On the negative side, my foremost issue is that the project has very little to do with what we learned in the nine courses before. I get that you will always see new data formats as a data scientist, but having the whole course cover numeric data and then having the final project be on text data where you can't apply what you learned seems sub-optimal. Also, to me it seemed that the accuracy increased mostly with how much data you train your algorithms on, and not so much how you design your algorithm. My second issue is that the class only starts every two months, and the assignments are blocked before the session starts so you can't see them if you're trying to get a head start. What happened to everyone learning at their own pace? I have a lot to do and had to switch sessions at least once for most classes, and this class was really stressful for me because I didn't want to move my completion back by two months. Lastly, I really hate RPresenter and that the instructors force us to use it, but maybe that's just me.

On the positive side, I did learn a lot: The basics of text prediction, how to do parallel programming in R and how to set up an RStudio instance on AWS (the latter two are not very hard, I recommend them to anyone struggling with gigantic runtimes, as long as you're willing to invest like $40 or so for the computing power). I liked that the guidelines were very broad, so there was a lot of room for creativity. I also finally found out how to make an pretty(-ish) presentation in R, though I would always choose Powerpoint in real life.

I really enjoyed the series as a whole and learned a great deal.

nice course, and the project task is a quite interesting one

Very instructive, since it presents you with a real world problem, that you need to solve by yourself, in all of its complexity.

I really had fun working on this project.