Learning new things and playing around with new tools, apps is what we always want and which helps us to grow our carrier and knowledge.

In my free time this month, I took one of the course from Coursera. https://www.coursera.org/

Coursera is an education platform that partners with top universities and organizations worldwide, to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free as well as you can earn or achieve certified certificate too.

Beside than certificate, the knowledge we learn from here is a step towards the success in our carriers.

This time I took a course as ‘Developing Data Products’ which is provided by Johns Hopkins University.

About the Course

A data product is the production output from a statistical analysis. Data products automate complex analysis tasks or use technology to expand the utility of a data informed model, algorithm or inference. This course covers the basics of creating data products using Shiny, R packages, and interactive graphics. The course will focus on the statistical fundamentals of creating a data product that can be used to tell a story about data to a mass audience.

You can find more about this course through:

https://www.coursera.org/course/devdataprod

For this, you need to install R-Studio, R –language, Shinny package and other related packages. Also, you can learn more related to R-language, R-studio, and Shiny app from different courses available in Coursera.

R-Studio:

You can download R-studio,

http://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/

R:

R version, currently we have R V 3.1.3. You can download from cran.

http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/

GitHub:

Also, you should open github account which is mostly useful to share codes, docs & as well as you can share ideas and involve in the Projects, also can browse interesting projects & solves all types of interesting problems.

https://github.com/

I have opened my github account as

https://github.com/maharjananil

Shiny & Shiny App:

Then you can open shinyapps account. You can directly login by using the Github same account.

https://www.shinyapps.io/

I have published one app after learning this course as:

https://anilmaharjan.shinyapps.io/FacebookAnalysis/

This shiny app is mainly used to analysis or to find out Facebook site visitor’s vs. other sites. How much time a person spent his/her time in Facebook or in other sites based on per hour, day, and months. Detail analysis can be found out if we can have exact site visit data. This is just a sample data which is not accurate, we can compares trends of site statistics if we can have exact data. .

Thinking of the project in Shinny apps as: Let’s drill into your Facebook data to extract your story. :http://www.slideshare.net/anil_maharjan/using-power-query-to-tell-your-story-form-your-facebook-data

R Markdown / RPubs

Also, you can prepare the documents / presentation as directly publish in web from R. R Markdown documents that you have written in R-studio can be directly published into the web where RPubs comes. Where you can directly publish the R Markdown documents into web RPubs and share among all.

http://rpubs.com/

Summary:

Through this course I am able to learn these new tools, languages, data products, assessments, Quizzes, Projects. It feels like, I have been reading back to my engineering classes again. I must say that course lectures are great and have great knowledge in their respective fields.

This course helps me, how we can directly analysis the data and can tell the story behind the data using different data products, by creating shiny app and pushing in web where anyone can go through the app easily and can understand what the story behind the data is by themselves. Here, we don’t need to load the data into database, create any data models & use any reporting tools to play around data & make decision. Here we can directly play around with raw data using R-language & using shiny app along with different r-charts we can easily tell the story behind data quickly and effectively.

While learning this course I got some issue which I have shared along in forum /discussions.

https://class.coursera.org/devdataprod-012/forum/thread?thread_id=50

https://class.coursera.org/devdataprod-012/forum/thread?thread_id=93

Reference:

http://shiny.rstudio.com/tutorial/lesson1/

http://www.r-project.org/

Regards,

Anil Maharjan

BI Engineer

http://np.linkedin.com/in/maharjananil