A quick look at today’s corporate and commercial sector, and you are bound to come across the term Data Science or Data Analytics more than once. This is simply because data is becoming a vital component of any successful 21st-century company. You are also likely to encounter the term Big Data, which refers to the large volume of information handled by corporations. Take, for instance, a business mogul like Coca-Cola. The corporation openly admitted through its Data Strategy director that Big Data analytics played a big part in its successful customer retention program.
This makes it clear that data is considered to be one of the most valuable assets of any business and most businesses are spending a large number of resources on managing this data in a better way. This article will provide you with a list of the Best Online Data Science Programs available on the Internet.
Table of Contents
What is Data Science?
Image Source
To extract value from data, Data Science combines multiple fields such as Statistics, Scientific Methods, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Data Analysis. Data scientists are individuals who use a variety of skills to analyze data collected from the web, smartphones, customers, sensors, and other sources to derive actionable insights.
Data Science refers to the process of cleansing, aggregating, and manipulating data to perform advanced data analysis. The results can then be reviewed by analytic applications and data scientists to uncover patterns and enable business leaders to make informed decisions.
The Data Science lifecycle is divided into five stages, each with its own set of responsibilities:
- Capture: Data collection, data entry, signal reception, and data extraction are all steps in the data collection process. This stage entails gathering unstructured and structured data in its raw form.
- Maintain: Data Warehousing, Data Cleansing, Data Staging, Data Processing, and Data Architecture are all terms that can be used to describe the processes that are used to prepare data. This stage entails converting raw data into a usable form.
- Process: Data Mining, Clustering/Classification, Data Modeling, and Data Summarization are the steps involved in the process. Data scientists examine the prepared data for patterns, ranges, and biases to see if it can be used in predictive analysis.
- Analyze: Exploratory/Confirmatory, Predictive Analysis, Regression, Text Mining, and Qualitative Analysis are some of the methods that can be used to analyze data. This is where the lifecycle gets going. This stage entails conducting various data analyses.
- Communicate: Data Reporting, Data Visualization, Business Intelligence, and Decision-Making are all concepts that should be explained. Analysts prepare the analyses in easily readable forms such as charts, graphs, and reports in the final step
What is the Importance of Data Science?
While it has been proven that data has become a valuable asset in the present world, this entity is pretty useless in its raw form. Therefore, information has to be structured and organized for it to make any sense for any organization. This process involves skilled professionals with the appropriate expertise to work on data and convert it into a usable form, which is where the field of Data Science comes in.
Data Science is a broad profession that encompasses several sub-fields with one thing in common; they all involve analyzing data and extracting useful information. In the past five years, Data Science has risen to be among the top jobs across the world. More specifically, 2020 was the only year since 2016 that it wasn’t ranked first by Glassdoor’s annual ranking.
However, it is important to understand why Data Science is such an important profession. You need to examine three factors to understand this, namely demand, supply, and growth. When it comes to demand, the sole basis for most companies’ decision-making is data. Therefore, for corporations to get an accurate analysis from raw data, they need data scientists.
On the other hand, the supply of Data Scientists is still relatively low. This is both a good and a bad thing. If you’re looking to venture into the profession, then the opportunities are still plenty and untapped. However, this becomes a bad thing for companies since they actively look for data scientists to fill various positions.
Data Science has been showing an upward trajectory for close to a decade when it comes to growth. According to LinkedIn, Data Science jobs have seen a 650% increase since 2012.
Hevo is a No-code Data Pipeline that offers a fully managed solution to set up data integration from 100+ data sources (including 30+ free data sources) to numerous Business Intelligence tools, Data Warehouses, or a destination of choice. It will automate your data flow in minutes without writing any line of code. Its fault-tolerant architecture makes sure that your data is secure and consistent. Hevo provides you with a truly efficient and fully-automated solution to manage data in real-time and always have analysis-ready data.
Let’s look at Some Salient Features of Hevo:
- Secure: Hevo has a fault-tolerant architecture that ensures that the data is handled in a secure, consistent manner with zero data loss.
- Schema Management: Hevo takes away the tedious task of schema management & automatically detects the schema of incoming data and maps it to the destination schema.
- Minimal Learning: Hevo, with its simple and interactive UI, is extremely simple for new customers to work on and perform operations.
- Hevo Is Built To Scale: As the number of sources and the volume of your data grows, Hevo scales horizontally, handling millions of records per minute with very little latency.
- Incremental Data Load: Hevo allows the transfer of data that has been modified in real-time. This ensures efficient utilization of bandwidth on both ends.
- Live Support: The Hevo team is available round the clock to extend exceptional support to its customers through chat, email, and support calls.
- Live Monitoring: Hevo allows you to monitor the data flow and check where your data is at a particular point in time.
Explore more about Hevo by signing up for the 14-day trial today!
5 Best Online Data Science Programs
Below are some of the most in-demand and Best Online Data Science Programs you can choose to learn from:
1) Best Online Data Science Programs: SQL Basics for Data Science
This is one of the essential courses indispensable to any Data Scientist since SQL is the most widely used language in data handling by most companies. A Data Scientist needs SQL skills to handle data stored in Relational Databases. Basic roles include querying databases and extracting data.
SQL as a language is popular among Data Scientists for a variety of reasons. First, the language helps access vast amounts of data from directly where it is stored. Also, Data Analysis in SQL is easy to replicate and audit. This, and many more, are some of the reasons why SQL Basics for Data Science is the top Data Science course.
You can sign up for this course here.
2) Best Online Data Science Programs: Applied Data Science with Python Specialization
In addition to SQL, Python understanding is a fundamental skill set required for a successful Data Science career. Python has continually proven itself to be the language of choice for Data Scientists. In 2016, it overtook R on Kaggle, a platform for Data Science competitions. That’s not the best part; it also overtook R on KDNuggets’s annual poll of Data Scientist’s most popular tools. Finally, in 2018, 66% of data scientists admitted to using it for daily tasks, propelling it to the number one programming language in the Data Science field. It is becoming a favorite among Data Scientists of today. Therefore, gaining essential skills in the language is bound to make you go a long way.
You can sign up for this course here.
3) Best Online Data Science Programs: Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate
Google launched the Data Analytics Professional Certificate in March of 2021. One might argue that this was perfect timing since there was a massive disparity between the supply of Data Analytics professionals and the demand, which left companies with losses due to the failure of utilizing data effectively. As a Data Analyst or Data Scientist by extension, your role is to collect data and transform it into conclusions and predictions that can be used for effective decision-making. The entry-level salary for a data analyst in the US is $67,000, with the region hosting approximately 337,400 jobs.
You can sign up for this course here.
4) Best Online Data Science Programs: IBM Data Science Professional Certificate
The IBM Data Science Certificate is designed for people with little or no knowledge of Data Science. It equips students with the required skills to start a successful career in Data Science, making them a perfect candidate for this list. This Python-based course from the historical computing giant IBM does not require much to get started, just some basic computer literacy, high school level mathematical knowledge, and willingness to adapt and learn new things.
You can sign up for this course here.
5) Best Online Data Science Programs: Harvard Edu Data Science and Machine Learning
The most popular Data Science techniques derive their principle working methodologies from Machine Learning. These are a group of processes that allow computers to learn from data and predict trends over time. Applications include Spam Detectors, Speech Recognition Systems, Movie Recommendation Systems, etc.
You can sign up for this course here.
Conclusion
The list above contains some of the best online Data Science programs. The demand for professionals in the mentioned fields is only increased as data becomes a core decision-making influencer in today’s business world. By taking these courses, you are one step closer to becoming a fully certified Data Scientist and diving into the interesting world of data.
The first step in implementing any Data Science algorithm is integrating the data from all sources. However, most businesses today have an extremely high volume of data with a dynamic structure that is stored across numerous applications. Creating a Data Pipeline from scratch for such data is a complex process since businesses will have to utilize a high amount of resources to develop it and then ensure that it can keep up with the increased data volume and Schema variations. Businesses can instead use automated platforms like Hevo.
Hevo helps you directly transfer data from a source of your choice to a Data Warehouse or desired destination in a fully automated and secure manner without having to write the code or export data repeatedly. It will make your life easier and make data migration hassle-free. It is User-Friendly, Reliable, and Secure.
Details on Hevo pricing can be found here. Give Hevo a try by signing up for the 14-day free trial today.