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If you want to become a skilled data analyst, you should know how to understand and analyze data. And statistics are crucial.
However, learning statistics can seem challenging, especially if you don’t have a background in mathematics or computer science. But do not worry. We’ve put together a list of statistics courses – from introductory statistics to slightly more advanced concepts – that you can take for free.
You don’t need to complete all of these courses to become proficient in statistics for data science. Therefore, we encourage you to familiarize yourself with the courses that are particularly compelling to you. Let’s start!
Note: You can revision all courses below for free on Coursera.
The Introduction to statistics The Stanford course is a good first statistics course. The goal of this course is to teach all the statistical thinking concepts that are necessary to understand and analyze data.
Here is an overview of the course content:
- Introduction and descriptive statistics for data mining
- Data creation and sampling
- Probability
- Normal approximation and binomial distribution
- Sampling distributions and the central limit theorem
- Regression
- Confidence intervals
- Significance tests
- Resampling
- Categorical data analysis
- One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA)
- Many comparisons
To combine: Introduction to statistics
Basic statistics at the University of Amsterdam is also another beginner-friendly statistics course. This course requires knowledge of R programming and covers the following topics:
- Data mining
- Correlation and regression
- Probability and probability distribution
- Sampling distributions
- confidence intervals and significance tests
To combine: Basic statistics
The Statistics for data science in Python is offered by IBM as part of Data Science Fundamentals with Python and SQL specialization.
This course will teach you how to apply Python to perform statistical tests and interpret the results of statistical analyses. The content of this course is as follows:
- Python basics
- Introduction and descriptive statistics
- Data visualization
- Introduction to probability distributions
- Hypothesis testing
- Regression analysis
To combine: Statistics for data science in Python
The power of statistics is offered by Google as part of the Google Advanced Data Analytics Professional certificate.
From summarizing datasets to performing hypothesis testing and modeling data using probability distributions, this course also focuses on statistical analysis in Python. The course covers the following topics:
- Introduction to statistics
- Probability
- Trying
- Confidence intervals
- Introduction to hypothesis testing
To combine: The power of statistics
The Statistics with Python specialization offered by the University of Michigan teaches you how to apply Python for data visualization, statistical inference, and modeling. It also highlights the importance of linking the business questions that need to be answered with appropriate data analysis methods.
This is a three-course specialization covering the required theory and Python programming tasks to lend a hand you apply everything you have learned. The specialization classes are as follows:
- Understanding and visualizing data in Python
- Inferential statistical analysis in Python
- Fitting statistical models to data with Python
To combine: Statistics with Python specialization
And that’s the wrap. We’ve gone through five courses that you can take for free to learn statistics and improve your data science skills.
Since most of these courses focus on programming and performing statistical tests in Python, rather than just learning theoretical concepts, I’m sure you’ll find plenty of opportunities to apply what you’ve learned. Have fun learning and keep coding!
Priya C’s girlfriend is a software developer and technical writer from India. He likes working at the intersection of mathematics, programming, data analytics and content creation. Her areas of interest and specialization include DevOps, data analytics and natural language processing. She likes reading, writing, coding and coffee! He is currently working on learning and sharing his knowledge with the developer community by writing tutorials, guides, reviews, and more. Bala also creates compelling resource overviews and coding tutorials.