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Data Mining Courses

Take free online data mining courses to build your skills and advance your career. Learn data mining and other in-demand subjects with courses from top universities and institutions around the world on edX.

learn data mining

learn data mining

What is Data Mining?

Data mining is the process of analyzing a data set to find insights. Once data is collected in the data warehouse, the data mining process begins and involves everything from cleaning the data of incomplete records to creating visualizations of findings. Data mining is usually associated with the analysis of the large data sets present in the fields of big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence. The process looks for patterns, anomalies and associations in the data with the goal of extracting value. For example, in the case of self-driving cars, data associations could help identify driving actions that are more likely to lead to accidents. The six core stages of the data mining process include anomaly detection, dependency modelling, clustering, classification, regression and report generation.

Online Courses in Data Mining

Students can learn data mining skills, tools and techniques in analytics, statistics and programming courses. Courses in big data, for example, will teach you essential data mining tools such as Spark, R and Hadoop as well as programming languages like Java and Python. Learn how to build probabilistic and statistical models, explore the exciting world of predictive analytics and gain an understanding of the requirements for large-scale data analysis. If you are just starting out, get an introduction to data mining fundamentals with Programming with Python for Data Science from Microsoft. The self-paced course demonstrates how to take raw data and prepare it for the data mining process as well as various important visualization techniques. Learn how to start looking at data from the perspective of the data scientist with the goal of extracting valuable intelligence. For further study, enroll in the MicroMasters Big Data certificate program or one of the advanced online data mining courses such as Data Mining: Theories and Algorithms for Tackling Big Data from Tsinghua University, edX partner and China’s leading institution of higher learning. Learn about different applications of data mining and get experience working with data mining algorithms. Courses in statistics such as Harvard’s Statistics and R or Georgia Tech’s Statistical Modeling and Regression Analysis are also excellent online courses to help you on your journey into this exciting field.

Data Mining Jobs

Data mining skills are in high demand due to the growth of big data and the Internet of Things (IoT). Companies are looking for data experts who can extract valuable insights to keep them competitive and ahead of the curve. A search for “data mining” on Indeed.com resulted in over 11,000 job listings for positions such as Machine Learning Engineer, Data Engineer, Data Scientist and Business Intelligence Analyst, all requiring outstanding data mining skills and experience. Indeed listed over 2,000 open, full-time positions for data mining specialists in the United States with salary estimates ranging from $70K to $125K per year. And people new to the field of data mining will find many internships available. Look for entry-level positions like Data Intern, Data Modeling Analyst or Big Data Intern.

Explore a Career in Data Mining

Data mining is a profession in high demand, fueled by the exponential growth of data. Enroll in one of the introductory data analysis, machine learning or big data courses and see if a career as a data mining engineer is right for you.