When you start statistics with practical examples, people tend to presume certain things (e.g. independence is given like in munchausen example) so I sort of understand this desire to keep every definition abstract/pure for solid foundations but damn, this course goes way too far. I took statistics at uni and this was a refresher on the specialisation track but the way Bayes' rule was covered made me doubt what I knew. Oh also, the instructor does some of my biggest pet peeves which are (1) using his preferred notations without actually reading it out loud first (2) unnecessary use of synonyms which just distract me from what he actually means (3) reading from slides without any context as to how these concepts are used.

Also, the concepts are elaborated on a seemingly random basis. Mean is left at "center of mass" like we just came out of physics 101 but the area under a curve is dragged out with random wood cutting analogies. I am just surprised at how all over the place this course is so far. Anyone starting from scratch, I highly recommend probability and statistics reading and some basic calculus elsewhere first. Otherwise you will get frustrated with this course.

This course is a fucking shitshow. Not only does Brian Caffo not explain anything, he has a tremendous gift to confuse people and make them forget / not understand anymore what they already knew. Great fucking course. Not. Hated it from the first minute.

The teach methods changed too drastically starting with this course. Much more prerequisite knowledge is required then is included int his concentration course set. No foundation or warning is given regarding this change and prerequisites. I had to seek out and spend countless hours on many other learning resources to get through this course and still don't understand what this course was trying to teach.

Poorly organized content and the lectures are presented in a confusing way. The lecturer obviously knows the material well, but is not able to present it well. He should use more sample problems annd examples. In addition, I am having trouble getting my submission graded, although I have already graded 6 fellow students.

I couldn't make it through this course because I can't stand looking at the instructor's face on the screen. It is very distracting. He is also not very clear in his whiteboard explanations, too much scribbling. I prefer courses taught by Roger Peng.

The only reason for enrolling is to complete the data science specialization, though it may make you reconsider continuing with it. The instructor and provided materials fail to adequately explain the concepts this course is supposed to cover, and do not prepare students for the quizzes or assignments. If you don't know statistics you won't learn it here. If you know statistics, you don't need this course.

I've taken several statistics, data science, and R courses. This is one of the worst. I took others' advice, and I also strongly suggest looking to other sources to learn Statistical Inference before taking this course. Khan Academy, DataCamp, Udacity, Duke (Coursera), and Columbia (edX) all have great courses. Though they vary in depth, each leaves you with a good understanding of the concepts they teach.

very unclear and monotonic lectures

At this point in the specialization, I was really worn out by the effort that I needed to put into this course (I solved the homework questions too). While I have no problem with the math, some topics like power should not even have been discussed or should have just been discussed in passing. Caffo spent a whole week on that. After taking the Applied Data Science in Python Specialization, I have a feeling like this course and Regression Models can just be merged, while logistics regression could just be transferred to the machine learning course.

Fortunately, the final assignment was very easy compared to the previous courses and one could finish it reasonably in a day (Reproducible Research final assignment itself took me almost a week) .

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.

The material is obviously invaluable but I thought the lectures themselves were lacking.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Very difficult course even for someone who had learnt Mathematics and Statistic at the University level. Many concepts were very tersely explained with very few examples. The course book definitely helped. I would say two semesters of Statistics were squeezed into this course. Homework work exercises were very interesting and interactive.

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

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

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

Very horrible course. This course is a good example of how to design a bad online course and teach a complex material so it's more difficult to understand. I'd give other courses a shot instead of this one, unless you want the specialization.

First, the course should have listed R programming as a prerequisite. Second, instead of only reading the definition of terms, he should have explained what they are and give example. I spent more than 4x of the video lecture length, trying to think and follow, but I still didn't understand. No example, no explanation, just *reading* the definition right off the text book using mathematical term. Math is complex, but it can be explained so everyone can understand. Third, I simply have a hard time understanding why the professor has to talk so fast and edit his video and/or make slides so text pops up in order to speed up the lecture instead of writing along as he speaks and explains (but there was no explanation in the lecture anyway so pausing the video to slow down wouldn't help). It's difficult to catch up or take notes when he edits video so text pop up very quickly. I don't think there's a restriction on the video. Overall, horrible experience.

I'm sure he is super nice and smart, but Caffo is an awful instructor. I kept waiting for him to actually get to the explanation of what he is talking about, but he never does. He explains the equation...with the equation. I really like statistics, but he was beginning to change my mind and somehow I was actually unlearning everything I had learned from other courses in the past. I would highly suggest taking this somewhere else, I like the one from Duke on Coursera, she actually explained things and I could understand!

It is one of the most important courses in Data Science. It covers most of the mathematical portion and it is hard as well for a non-mathematical student.

For a minimum, every sentence will have any of the four words like distribution, sample, probability, variance, mean, median, standard deviation, etcetera. We have to spend enough time and to be very careful in understanding each and every sentence.

But this course was nicely categorized by Brian Caffo & others, This presentation was the simplest one on probability & statistics, I ever saw and it covers majority of the basic concepts.

Thanks to Brian Caffo, Roger D. Peng & Jeff Leek.