The first in our Professional Certificate Program in Data Science, this course will introduce you to the basics in R programing. You can better retain R when you learn it to solve a specific problem, so you’ll use a real-world dataset about crime in the United States. You will learn the R skills needed to answer essential questions about differences in crime across the different states.

We’ll cover R’s functions and data types, then tackle how to operate on vectors and when to use advanced functions like sorting. You’ll learn how to use general programming features like ‘if-else,’ and ‘for loop’ commands, and how to wrangle, analyze and visualize data.

Rather than covering every R skill you might need, you’ll build a strong foundation to prepare you for the more in-depth courses later in the series, where we cover concepts such as probability, inference, regression and machine learning. We help you develop a skill set that includes R programming, data wrangling with dplyr, data visualization with ggplot2, file organization with UNIX/Linux, version control with git and GitHub, and reproducible document preparation with RStudio.

The demand for skilled data science practitioners is rapidly growing, and this series prepares you to tackle real-world data analysis challenges.

HarvardX has partnered with DataCamp for all assignments. This allows students to program directly in a browser-based interface. You will not need to download any special software, but an up-to-date browser is recommended.