Advanced Machine Learning
The Open University
  • Start Date: 25 Mar, 2019
  • 4 weeks
  • Study Content: Videos


Improve your understanding of machine learning. Explore advanced techniques and how to use them in your data science projects.

Course Fee: Free
Certificate Cost: See Fees and Eligibility

Course Description

This course is made available through the eLearnAfrica and FutureLearn partnership.

Discover and apply advanced statistical machine learning techniques


This online course explores advanced statistical machine learning.


You will discover where machine learning techniques are used in the data science project workflow. You will then look in detail at supervised learning statistical modeling algorithms for classification and regression problems, examining how these algorithms are related, and how models generated by them can be tuned and evaluated.


You will also look at feature engineering and how to analyse sufficiency of data.


This is an advanced course and some experience with machine learning, data science or statistical modeling is expected. Links will be provided to basic resources about assumed knowledge.


Sections of the course make use of advanced mathematics, including statistics, linear algebra, calculus and information theory. If you have prior knowledge of these areas, particularly the first two, you will obtain additional insights into the methods used. If you do not have this prior knowledge, you will still be able to achieve the learning outcomes of the course.


The course uses R. If you have not programmed with R before, you should consider taking a quick introductory course, such as Try R.


Certificate cost may vary. You will be redirected to the host page for cost and payment options.

The Open University

The Open University (OU) is the largest academic institution in the UK and a world leader in flexible distance learning.

Since it began in 1969, the OU has taught more than 1.8 million students and has almost 220,000 current students, including more than 15,000 overseas. The Open University is rated one of the best in the UK for student satisfaction in the National Student Survey. The OU is one of only four UK universities to have consistently achieved more than 90% in the survey’s history. Over 70% of students are in full-time or part-time employment, and four out of five FTSE 100 companies have sponsored staff to take OU courses.

The UK’s latest Research Excellence Framework exercise (REF 2014) places The Open University in the top third of UK higher education institutions by ‘research power’ ranking. 72% of OU research submitted was assessed as world-leading or internationally excellent.

Regarded as Britain’s major e-learning institution, the OU is a world leader in developing technology to increase access to education on a global scale. Its vast ‘open content portfolio’ includes free study units on OpenLearn, which has had more than 26.7 million visits, and materials on iTunes U, which has recorded more than 60 million downloads. The OU has a 41 year partnership with the BBC which has moved from late-night lectures in the 1970s to prime-time programmes such as Frozen Planet, Bang Goes the Theory, James May’s Big Ideas and The Money Programme.

All Open University Science courses presented on FutureLearn are produced with the kind support of Dangoor Education.

This institution is available on eLearnAfrica through partnership with FutureLearn.

You may be able to download course materials after enrolling in this course. If not, all of the necessary course materials provided by the course instructor will be available on the provider's course page.
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