Project Botticelli

Live Tutored Online Courses

Practical Machine Learning

Student Mortarboard Because of the recent changes to the Microsoft data science and machine learning technologies, and the impact of recent AI innovations, we hope to replace both of our existing, successful Machine Learning and Data Science courses in 2024. We will still plan to teach Microsoft Azure ML, and to focus on data science using open-source R in conjuction with the Microsoft data platform based on Microsoft Azure. Our classes are live, fully-tutored, and use our online delivery format designed for American, European, and some Asian time zones. Courses are also available, in person, in Norway, through our partner.

Registration and Dates

You will be able to book our courses using this page once we have announced the 2024 dates. Get our newsletter (right/below) to be notifed of the dates.

Key Benefits

Customers who have attended these classes are immediately able to start valuable data science and machine learning projects. You will be able to:

  • Find hidden patterns in your data that help you increase productivity and make it clearer what impacts it.
  • Discover business process obstacles that have lead to failures and inefficiencies by modelling your data, such as customer events, production line sensor readings, logs and history.
  • Detect and predict anomalies, such as fraud, data entry mistakes, extreme and usual behaviours.
  • Forecast and predict future with greater accuracy by using state of the art data science methods that combine machine learning with statistical analysis.
  • Segment your customers and products in meaningful but not otherwise obvious or easy to find ways.
  • Make better business decisions by experimenting with ideas in a controlled and statistically significant manner.
  • Predict VIP customers and their lifetime value.
  • Identify sales prospects who are the most (or the least) likely to be interested in a product.
  • Understand networks of behaviours, sales patterns, cycles and other connections between them that have a business value.
  • Make product recommendations and suggest the best next action for your customers.

Azure Machine Learning in Practice: From Fundamentals to Deployment

Microsoft Azure ML Logo This intensive, 5-day, online, hands-on classroom-style course will teach you everything necessary to prepare your data, build, evaluate, and, most importantly, validate machine learning models, before deploying them to production, using the newest version of Microsoft Azure Machine Learning—all with little coding, thanks to the new, highly visual yet powerful Microsoft Azure ML tools. You do not need to have a prior coding experience in any programming language to benefit from this course. You will learn all the fundamentals of machine learning, including the most important algorithms and their performance metrics such as precision and recall, validation charts and curves, like the ROC chart, and much more.

Read the detailed Azure ML course description.

Machine Learning and Data Science in R with Microsoft SQL

The R Logo is © 2016 The R Foundation A very intensive, hands-on, online, 5-day course designed for those who want to learn more in-depth machine learning and data science using R. As you study the free, open source R, you will also learn how to easily make R incredibly fast, scalable, and enterprise-ready with Machine Learning Services available in SQL Server, Azure SQL, Azure Synapse, and Azure Managed Instance, using RStudio. You will learn: how to prepare and visualise data in R, build, evaluate, and validate models, how to deploy them to production in-database, in-app, and as a web service. You will study, in detail, the most important classification, clustering, regression and forecasting algorithms. You will write your own code for analysing your results and for drawing statistically meaningful conclusions—and you will understand the limits of confidence that you can place in that approach. Having prior knowledge of programming in any language is helpful, however, if you are prepared to do an extra bit of homework Rafal will help even complete novices to get their introduction to programming.

Read the detailed R and SQL course description.

Why attend these classes?

Because of Rafal’s 10+ years of real-world machine learning experience.

You will not only learn all the concepts and tools that you need to know from an experienced teacher who has trained over 950 data scientists world-wide, Photo of Rafal Lukawiecki a highly-respected presenter, capable of holding your attention, but, above all, from a practitioner of machine learning. Rafal Lukawiecki has been delivering ML, data mining, and data science projects for customers in retail, banking, entertainment, healthcare, manufacturing, education, and government sectors for twelve years. Because of that, you will learn:

  • everything essential to starting data science, ML, and AI projects,
  • all fundamental concepts,
  • how to avoid common pitfalls,
  • how to work fast and with accuracy,
  • what is really useful and practical,
  • what is more theoretical but still important,
  • what hype you should be wary of.

You will be able to ask any questions related to your industry and you will get relevant, pragmatic, no-nonsense answers, helping you get ahead with your own projects.

Learn from Rafal who has done it all, not from those who just teach it—this is why it is Practical Machine Learning.

How Are These Courses Different?

Rafal teaches ML and data science using Azure ML, Open Source R and Mirosoft SQL Server. Other courses teach just the technology to those who already know data science and machine learning.

  • Unlike on other courses, especially Microsoft Official Curriculum (MOC), you will actually learn machine learning and data science during this intensive week. By working harder than on MOC training, and thanks to Rafal’s experience, you will learn both the technology and the concepts in just one week.
  • Our course is updated immediately before every delivery because technology changes fast. MOC courses are out of date, and they do not cover recent innovations.
  • Our course covers a wide spectrum of technology including open source. MOC focuses only on Microsoft, forcing you to learn the necessary rest, like Pandas or RStudio, somewhere else.

New Live Way to Learn Online

Following videos at your own pace is convenient and cost-effective, but learning is easier with direct support by the tutor, even if it costs a little more. Coursework and labs that actively involve you will help you understand the theory and make it applicable to real-world. Everyone suffers from videoconferencing fatigue. All in all, it meant we have designed this course a bit differently: there are 3 delivery components:

  1. 5 half-day live online lectures by Rafal Lukawiecki, with everyone participating, between the hours of 14:00-17:30 UTC (6–9.30am PST, 9am–12.30pm EST, 15:00-18:30 CET). Each session will comprise of a lecture, live demos, and plenty of time to answer any questions.
  2. Your own work, taking approx 2–3 hours to complete the labs and assignments, which you are expected to do before the next half-day lecture starts. We will provide you with the necessary data and files and (if needed) Azure VM images that contain a full set-up of all the necessary software that you are expected to run using your own Azure account (free trial is acceptable).
  3. Small-group 2.5 hour online tutoring sessions with Rafal to review the lab work, to provide course assistance, and to answer any additional questions. These sessions will take place outside of the lecture hours and will match the European and American time zones. Every student will have an opportunity to participate in 4 of those tutoring sessions during the week. We will be flexible in offering additional one-to-one support for anyone needing additional tutorial time. We want everyone to succeed!

Student Testimonials

Small selection of comments from students:

This was the most well-thought out and practical course on data science that I have attended during my 10-years in analytics. Rafal’s lucid and engaging style ensured a learning experience that was infinitely more stimulating and thought provoking than one might expect from 5 days of technical training delivered remotely. I look forward to applying Rafal’s wisdom to real-world business problems, confident of avoiding the implementation pitfalls that so often beset machine learning projects.
Brian, Department of Social Protection, Ireland

The course was an immense learning experience, tapping into the vast knowledge base that is Rafal. His presentation skills and technique made the learning experience very enjoyable. The pace at which he managed to deliver the content was remarkable, even when delayed to answer questions he still managed to run through the enormous subject matter and keep to schedule. All in all it was a very enjoyable learning experience that has fuelled my desire to learn more on the subject.
Sean, Globoforce, Ireland

I highly recommend this course. Rafal’s knowledge, teaching skills and humour makes complex challenges much easier to grasp and understand.
Asbjørn, Genus AS, Norway

I initially stumbled across the Practical Data Science course having seen and been impressed by videos of Rafal speaking at Microsoft Ignite. I appreciated and enjoyed the way he discussed his (extensive) practical experience in the field as much as the technology and am pleased to say the course was no different. I came into the course from a background of working with database’s, but the world of data science is something I’ve always wanted to get more involved in. This course seemed to be ideally tailored for this.
Callum, UK public sector company

I had the pleasure of attending “Practical Data Science” in Copenhagen with Rafal. The course was great, and is just the way it is described—not only was it practical and exciting, but followed by in depth understanding of theory. Rafal is a great instructor, and certainly one of the best experts that I have had the chance to meet. Throughout the whole course I learned a lot and Rafal even took time to debate specific problems that we were contemplating.
Philip, Inspari A/S, Denmark

I can only recommend this course. Rafal is an excellent teacher. He shows real world examples that are directly applicable.
Jacquel, Datalytics AG, Switzerland

Bookings, payment, and discounts

All bookings can be made using our online checkout. Use the green button on this page.

  • Credit card or PayPal is accepted using our checkout.
  • Alternatively, you can request a quote/PO/pro-forma invoice using the checkout, and pay by a bank transfer.
  • If you have a relationship with our partners, Prodata, they would be delighted to accept our quote/PO/pro-forma generated by the checkout and issue you a Prodata invoice.
  • We accept payment in EUR and USD. The USD price is fixed while the EUR price is calculated daily using the current European Central Bank reference USD rate. If you generate a quote/PO/pro-forma using the checkout we ask that you settle it within 45 days, however you are welcome to regenerate the quote at any time, assuming we still have available spaces.
  • To book multiple places please increase the quantity after adding the class to the shopping cart. Please reply to the order confirmation listing the names of the attendees you would like to enroll, in addition, or even instead of the booking person.
  • We offer a discount for booking multiple courses and/or multiple participants. Use code LIVETWO to get 10% of the total for booking 2, or code LIVEMORE to get 15% of the total for booking 3+ courses and/or participants.
  • The price of the course is subject to change and may increase in the future, however, all prices on existing bookings (including quotes/PO/pro-forma if valid) will be honoured.

Cancellation policy

We understand that your situation can change, especially in these times. We are happy to offer full flexibility and a refund, subject to these conditions:

  • Your participation can be cancelled up to 6 weeks prior to the start of the course for a full refund.
  • Cancellations up to 4 weeks can receive 50% refund of fees due, or rebook for a future course at no additional cost.
  • The fee becomes non-refundable with less than 4 weeks prior to the start of the course, however, we would be happy to offer the flexibility of a rebooking for a future date, or for another of our courses, at no additional cost.

R logo shown above © The R Foundation CC-BY-SA 4.0

Book Azure ML

$1,999 (about €1764)

* Based on the current ECB reference rate.

Dates for 2024 will be announced in our newsletter.

Book R for ML and SQL

$1,999 about €1764

* Based on the current ECB reference rate.

New 2024 course will be announced in our newsletter.