I was very disappointed by this course. The professor was knowledgeable, but was difficult to understand and spoke quickly. Even the transcript had the words [INAUDIBLE] listed multiple times because he was so difficult to understand. There were no slides, so note taking was difficult. The course also requires paying $25 for an Excel Add-In, which was not mentioned before enrolling in the course. The Excel Add-In is a different version from the version used in the video, so it was very difficult to follow along because the screens and outputs were different. I also had an issue with the Excel Add-In that made some of my work late because the issue could not be resolved quickly. The Analytic Solver (the Add-Inrepresentative said the problem was on their end, and had to fix the issue himself. Overall I was extremely disappointed and would not recommend this course to anyone. If this had been the first course in the specialization, I would not have continued. In my opinion UC-B needs to rethink if they should even offer this course.

This class doesn't even deserve that one star.

It is easily the worst class I've ever taken on Coursera. The data in the final does not match the description. There are mistakes in the lessons and on the quiz. There is no feedback to forum. The instructor's English is of a very low level and he speaks entirely too quickly.

Coursera, please delete this class. Look at the comments below.

This module is badly organised and taught. The lecturer goes through the concepts with no explanation or illustration. As a result, it was hard to understand the significance and applicability of the concepts taught. It was also very hard to catch what he was saying as his voice was not clear and no slides were provided. Further, no answer key was provided for the assignments and quizzes - we wont even know why we got the question(s) wrong and what should be the correct step(s). The final assignment/quiz was kind of a repeat of the first four quizzes/assignments using a different set of data. While I appreciate that this is to give us more practice, it wasn't very useful as the lack of answer key for the first four assignments/quizzes meant that we couldn't quite know the reason for getting certain question(s) wrong earlier on.

The instructor's accent is difficultto understand. The subtitles are also not helpful as sometimes it also misintreprets what the instructor is saying or writes(incoherent). The instructor is too fast and has explained concept too briefly. Many times I had to google to understand the concept and pass the quiz.

Being a part of the specialisation, it is necessary to pass this course. However, the answers of the quiz are also sometimes not correct.

I wish this course is thoroughly revised with some other instructor as it is very hard to understand with the present Instructor.

The forum is also completely unresponsive.

Please update this course.

Its my individual perception about this course, reason of poor review

1) The instructor is very quick, not sure what is intended to present

2) The whole concept is based on XLMINER tool, which is free for 2 weeks. The tool is upgraded but the course material didn't.

3) Quiz questions and answers, not sure if those are ever verified. Its very specific to older version of XLMiner tool.

4) Not much support from moderator.

I liked the course information but it moves too fast. Week 4 module is too complicated to be covered in a 5 minute video. Many concepts should be explained in detail with examples. The teacher doesn't have a very easy accent to understand and there are many occasions when some really difficult concepts are covered in less than a minute.

This course is fine to get basic understanding of predictive modelling but you need to study a lot on your own to truly understand the statistics behind them and concepts described in this course.

There are a lot better courses for the time. This course mostly teaches you how to use XLMiner which is a paid Excel add on that I am 99% certain I will never use again.

Week 3 application assignment is buggy. If you input correct answers they will be marked as incorrect. You must use trial and error to find the wrong answers the quiz is looking for. It's a badly designed assignment that wastes students' time and creates a lot of frustration. Would not recommend the course because of it.

It is hard to follow this tutor. You have always to reed the subtitles to understand the course.

I took the Advanced Business Analytics Specialization as a full time student. I finished the first four courses in more or less 3 weeks. In the last course needed to take the Specialization Certificate, the Advanced Business Analytics Capstone, the assignments of the course during the 2nd-3rd-4rth week were locked until 20 December - 5 January. That means that I had to wait more than one month, and pay 2 more subscriptions to Coursera!!! In the forum of the class there are more than 20 moderators, none of them has even one reply in anything. I made a thread, nonone replied to me. I contacted the customer service, they told me that they are sorry and they cannot change it.

This is not a policy of an educational institute, this is an attitude that wants to take only your money. If you want your certificate, come back after two months AND KEEP PAYING!! I canceled my subscription, I do not want the certificate, I want to cooperate with organization that respect my effort, my time, my money, to respect me.

The instructor speaks too quickly and I think this will make it difficult for non-native English speakers to understand the material. This material will also be more understandable to individuals with a statistical analysis background, not enough time is spent on explanation and it will be necessary to supplement the class if you don't have the proper background. Passing the class by rote following of the examples will not give you the proper proficiency.

I don't mean to criticize and I believe the content your courses offer is always great but I had difficulty with the instructor's speech delivery and his accent.

I think this course has a very limited utility:

1) It's mainly referred to XLMiner, which is an excel add-on with a 15-days free trial. I think 99.999% of us will never use XLMiner again;

2) It's too much focused how to use the XLMiner tool, while the "content" part is rushed in some lessons

3) The framework is totaly absent: no business applications provided, no "why"/context but only tools

I found very tough to find useful takeaways, with a lot of untapped potential for this course.

The material is fine, a bit rushed at the end. My biggest issue with this course is the lack of support when it comes to addressing system-related issues. I've had to resolve these on my own, because neither forums, Coursera, or Frontline Solvers customer care could help.

The professor does not explain the concepts well enough, to be quite honest. I have simply used his videos as a way to Wikipedia the concepts to actually understand what he is trying to explain. Also, I think it would be beneficial to provide information prior to signing up for the course (or Advanced BA path) stating that there is additional content to purchase.

While the content (common predictive regression and classification algorithms and tools like XLMiner) was useful, little to no support was provided in the forums. The assignments in Week 3 and Week 4 in particular were either vague or had errors that nobody double checked and course-takers had to use trial and error approach to get answers right.

Lots of info in 4 short weeks... the instructor did a good job of getting through it. I had issues with neural networks in XLMiner -- particularly, boosting and bagging; my in-Excel XLMiner wouldn't run models without terminating with an error. Using the in-the-cloud version of XLMiner was better because the menus matched what the instructor was showing in the videos (my desktop version did not). However, I never was able to get the right answer on any neural network boosting or bagging questions on any quiz, though I got all the other questions right - creating decision trees or logistic regression models through XLMiner, even boosting/bagging decision tree models, both Classify and Predict. There was zero traffic in the discussion forums (people were begging people to grade their peer assignments so they could get a grade) so there was zero response to my pleas for assistance. It was pretty frustrating. I finally got through the class because getting everything right except neural network boosting/bagging questions enabled me to squeak through with a passing score. I hate not knowing what I was doing wrong though. Perhaps the instructor's version had different default values than the version I was using. Oh well. It's in the past :)

I loved the course. The explanations were very accurate and easy to understand. But, I consider that using XLMiner is not the best software approach. I understand that R or Python may imply some problem to people with no programming skills, but it's easier to reproduce results. XLMiner has different versions (and the tutorials are not aligned with latest versions) and is also dependant of the Office version. Thus, some answers must be given in a flip-of-a-coin approach.

This course has great content and I believe the professor is very knowledgeable about this subject matter. However, at times, it can be very difficult to understand what he is saying. I believe he knows the English language very well but, between his deep accent and speaking very quickly, there are a number of times I cannot understand what he is saying. This is reflected at times when reading the transcript below each video. I found it better to slow the video down to 0.75X the regular speed to hear him but that did not remove all of the difficulty.

I am sorry to say this is the worst course I have taken on Coursera:

1. The course was recorded in 2015/2016 and the XLMiner add-in for Excel has been updated, it is no longer called XLMiner.

2. The course content is superficial - there are just approximately 30 minutes of video for each module. No concepts are explained, instead just number crunching is taught.

3. No answers to quizzes are provided so one doesn't know what the correct answer should have been. This does not make for effective teaching and learning.

4. The instructor speaks too fast and reads from a script. Again a huge problem when trying to follow his videos.

If this wasn't a required course in the Advanced Business Analytics Specialization I would have dropped this course. As it is, this course took me forever to finish as it made for some extremely frustrating moments.

Please do something!!!

This course gave me a good understanding of the typical analytic tools used when doing predictive study. It has helped set the direction for my future business analytics study (don't expect to master all the topics in one short course!). If you don't already have a background in basic statistics you will probably struggle to understand much of the material. By basic I'm speaking of things such as basic hypothesis testing, error types, z scores, measures of variation and central tendency, confidence intervals, basic probability, basic understanding of logarithms and exponents.

Got to many techniques like boosting, bagging, Neural networks, regression tress etc.. Useful and informative course

Really good course, The videos are very precise and short, lot of learning, Loved this course

A challenging course, the most challenging I've had on Coursera to-date. The quiz questions really make certain that you have listened to and absorbed the course material. You will get full marks if you follow the instructions given in the videos regarding how to use the software, but you still need to do independent thought and analysis. Overall, I liked the course.

The only thing that keeps me from giving this five stars is the software package used for the course. I am on a Mac, and the software works best with Windows & excel. There is a web interface and Office 365 Extension for MacOs, but it is clunky.

Also, software costs $25 for 140 day license, and I am not certain how I feel about that. It would be better I think to design the course around R/Python, or to choose a software package that is free without time limitation (restricted functionality is fine, but work the course to operate within the free tier). That being said, I don't know how to do that either, and I am sure the instructors would have chosen that route if it was easier to teach that way on a MOOC.

The course is pretty good. Although it was hard to keep up with the teacher and his English, I managed to write notes using the text under the video. Later, reading the notes was okay since everything had more sense. I had to do some extra Google search since the explanations were not enough for me.

But the assignments and tests with the sample databases were the best. They really made me think and gave me a real foundation in my knowledge.

I am sad that XL Miner (Solver) is only 15 days and wished that the teacher would put a replacement tool we could use instead if the free subscription ends.

Much work should be done to improve.

The tutor organised the course with clear points and highlights questions during videos. The only confusion is about web version xlminer tool.