Duke University

Description This course teaches you how to calculate the return of a portfolio of securities as well as quantify the market risk of that portfolio, an important skill for financial market analysts in banks, hedge funds, insurance companies, and other financial services and investment firms. Using the R programming language with Microsoft Open R and…

Description Students of this course may try their hand at their own sound interventions and musical compositions, or simply focus on learning more about diverse musical traditions, sonic experimentation, and acoustic phenomena in everyday life. Designed by artist and Duke professor, Pedro Lasch, and UdK composer Mathias Hinke, this course is also co-taught by scholar…

Description This course describes Bayesian statistics, in which one’s inferences about parameters or hypotheses are updated as evidence accumulates. You will learn to use Bayes’ rule to transform prior probabilities into posterior probabilities, and be introduced to the underlying theory and perspective of the Bayesian paradigm. The course will apply Bayesian methods to several practical…

Description One of the skills that characterizes great business data analysts is the ability to communicate practical implications of quantitative analyses to any kind of audience member. Even the most sophisticated statistical analyses are not useful to a business if they do not lead to actionable advice, or if the answers to those business questions…

Description Introduction to Genetics and Evolution is a college-level class being offered simultaneously to new students at Duke University. The course gives interested people a very basic overview of some principles behind these very fundamental areas of biology. We often hear about new “genome sequences,” commercial kits that can tell you about your ancestry (including…

Description The capstone project will be an analysis using R that answers a specific scientific/business question provided by the course team. A large and complex dataset will be provided to learners and the analysis will require the application of a variety of methods and techniques introduced in the previous courses, including exploratory data analysis through…

Description Building on the course Programming Fundamentals, this course will teach you how to write code by first planning what your program should do—an important approach for novice and professional programmers. You will learn how to compile and run your program, and then how to test and debug it. This course builds on the Seven…

Description The oil and gas industry has an enormous impact on all aspects of daily life. Individuals, corporations, and national governments make financial and policy decisions based on the cost, use, and availability of these two natural resources. This two-week course looks at the two most fundamental aspects of the oil and gas industry, its…

Description Students of this course may try their hand at their own public art interventions, or simply focus on learning from the theory of public practice and its recent history. Designed by artist and Duke professor, Pedro Lasch, and co-taught by Creative Time artistic director, Nato Thompson, this course presents public culture and art in…

Description Important: The focus of this course is on math – specifically, data-analysis concepts and methods – not on Excel for its own sake. We use Excel to do our calculations, and all math formulas are given as Excel Spreadsheets, but we do not attempt to cover Excel Macros, Visual Basic, Pivot Tables, or other…