Build the machine learning foundation for healthcare demands! Learn how to turn complex clinical data into models that drive decision support, early warning, diagnostic assistance, and personalized treatment insights.

Machine Learning for Healthcare Applications

Machine Learning for Healthcare Applications
This course is part of Data Science for Healthcare Specialization


Instructors: Ramesh Sannareddy
Included with
Recommended experience
What you'll learn
Classify healthcare problems as supervised, unsupervised, or temporal ML tasks aligned with clinical workflows.
Build and train clinical ML models using meaningful features for prediction, clustering, and time-based risk scoring.
Evaluate models using discrimination, calibration, and clinical utility metrics with patient- and time-aware validation.
Interpret outputs, detect bias or leakage, and deliver actionable results to technical and clinical stakeholders.
Skills you'll gain
- Clinical Data Management
- Predictive Analytics
- Feature Engineering
- Logistic Regression
- Decision Tree Learning
- Predictive Modeling
- Supervised Learning
- Patient Safety
- Unsupervised Learning
- Classification Algorithms
- Clinical Informatics
- Machine Learning
- Health Informatics
- Dimensionality Reduction
- Model Evaluation
- Applied Machine Learning
- Time Series Analysis and Forecasting
- Data Preprocessing
- Forecasting
Details to know

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February 2026
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There are 4 modules in this course
Supervised learning forms the core of many widely used clinical decision-support tools, enabling predictions such as mortality risk, diagnostic assistance, readmission likelihood, and adverse event detection. In this module, you will understand how to convert clinical problems into prediction tasks, define features and labels appropriately, and evaluate whether supervised learning is the right framework for a given healthcare question. The module introduces essential algorithms, including logistic regression, tree-based models, and regularized regression, with a focus on interpretability and clinical reasoning. You will also explore common data pitfalls such as class imbalance and label leakage, both of which can disrupt clinical validity if mishandled. Through practical exercises, you will build foundational models used throughout healthcare analytics.
What's included
7 videos3 readings4 assignments1 discussion prompt3 plugins
Unsupervised learning enables clinicians and researchers to uncover hidden structure in patient populations, identify disease subtypes, and discover new risk categories when labeled outcomes are not available. This module focuses on clustering and dimensionality reduction for patient phenotyping, using both structured clinical data and aggregated EHR features. You will explore when and why unsupervised learning is used, compare major clustering algorithms, and practice interpreting clusters. You will also learn dimensionality reduction techniques used to visualize high-dimensional patient data and guide phenotype refinement. Finally, the module covers cluster validation, reproducibility, and clinical interpretability, all of which are essential to safely using unsupervised insights in healthcare.
What's included
4 videos3 readings4 assignments1 discussion prompt3 plugins
Healthcare data is inherently temporal, encompassing vitals, lab results, medications, and clinical events collected over time. This module introduces classical and feature-based methods to represent and analyze these longitudinal patterns for early warning, deterioration detection, and forecasting tasks. You will study the challenges of irregular clinical time series, construct time-window-based and aggregation-based features, and apply non-neural sequence modeling techniques suitable for clinical environments. The second half of the module covers rigorous evaluation methods for healthcare models. You will explore discrimination, calibration, thresholding, and clinical utility metrics, and will design validation strategies that respect temporal ordering, avoid information leakage, and reflect real clinical deployment constraints.
What's included
4 videos3 readings4 assignments1 discussion prompt4 plugins
In this final module, you will consolidate your learning of supervised learning, unsupervised learning, temporal modeling, and evaluation by completing a hands-on final project. You will complete an end-to-end project involving clinical problem formulation, model development, exploratory analysis, temporal feature construction, and model evaluation. You will justify model choices, articulate assumptions, and interpret findings from a clinical perspective. Emphasis is placed on communication and documentation, ensuring that results can be reviewed by both technical and clinical decision-makers. The module concludes with a course summary, a glossary of key terms, and a final exam designed to assess their conceptual understanding across all modules.
What's included
1 video3 readings1 assignment1 peer review1 discussion prompt1 plugin
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Frequently asked questions
You’ll work with realistic healthcare datasets that reflect common clinical machine learning challenges, such as missing values, irregular measurements, and time-based patterns. The labs help you practice building and evaluating models in conditions similar to real-world healthcare analytics.
This course is built for healthcare use cases where model performance must be interpreted through a clinical lens. It emphasizes how to frame clinical prediction problems, handle temporal healthcare data, and evaluate models in ways that reflect clinical risk and patient safety.
You’ll learn supervised learning for clinical prediction (classification and regression), unsupervised learning for patient subgroup discovery (clustering and dimensionality reduction), and temporal/sequence-based approaches for longitudinal healthcare data.
More questions
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¹ Some assignments in this course are AI-graded. For these assignments, your data will be used in accordance with Coursera's Privacy Notice.



