The objective of the Education and Lifelong Learning Work Stream is to provide guidance on developing data science knowledge and hands-on skills to apply in the workplace – whether members are new to the field or looking to advance their existing techniques.

Key Tasks

  • Reviewing recommended training courses and materials
  • Developing training paths for online learning
  • Co-ordinating written articles detailing experiences of continued learning in the Data Science field

Volunteer Roles

  • Taking courses to assess suitability of individual courses and training paths across a range of levels of expertise
  • Contributing to drafting articles about their own learning experiences –courses and applications in the workplace

Recommended Courses

We have reviewed a number of online Data Science courses available, which have been set out below. These include reviews from IFoA members that have taken these courses, and will hopefully help you in choosing the suitable courses for your learning path. We will be adding to this list in due course.

Stanford University’s ‘Machine Learning’ Coursera course, taught by Andrew Ng

Level: Beginner
Language: MATLAB or Octave
Cost: Free to audit (USD$80 to obtain certificate)

Outline: This course provides a broad introduction to machine learning, datamining, and statistical pattern recognition. Topics include: (i) Supervised learning (parametric/non-parametric algorithms, support vector machines, kernels, neural networks). (ii) Unsupervised learning (clustering, dimensionality reduction, recommender systems, deep learning). (iii) Best practices in machine learning (bias/variance theory; innovation process in machine learning and AI). The course will also draw from numerous case studies and applications.

DataCamp

Level: Beginner/Intermediate
Language: Python or R
Cost: Free introductory courses (full access requires $29/month subscription fee)

Outline: DataCamp is an online platform for learning data science techniques, with interactive R, Python, Sheets, SQL and shell courses. There is a huge range of subjects catered for, using a variety of programming languages and software types.  The platform is operated by individuals developing their own courses (some are employees of DataCamp, some are not) and then having these reviewed by DataCamp to ensure these courses meet the necessary standards.

Open Machine Learning Course mlcourse.ai by OpenDataScience

Level: Beginner
Language: Python
Cost: Free

Outline: mlcourse.ai is an open Machine Learning course by OpenDataScience. The course is designed to perfectly balance theory and practice. You can take part in several Kaggle in-class competitions held during the course. The next (and final) session launches on 2 September 2019.

Work Stream Leads

  • Ankush Agarwal
  • David Tudor-Griffith

Contact Details

If you have any questions about the Education and Lifelong Learning Work Stream please contact the Professional Communities Team

professional.communities@actuaries.org.uk

Events calendar

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