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⇱ Machine Learning for Healthcare Applications | Coursera


Machine Learning for Healthcare Applications

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Machine Learning for Healthcare Applications

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Gain insight into a topic and learn the fundamentals.
Intermediate level

Recommended experience

8 hours to complete
Flexible schedule
Learn at your own pace

Gain insight into a topic and learn the fundamentals.
Intermediate level

Recommended experience

8 hours to complete
Flexible schedule
Learn at your own pace

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.

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Recently updated!

February 2026

Assessments

13 assignments¹

AI Graded see disclaimer
Taught in English

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This course is part of the Data Science for Healthcare Specialization
When you enroll in this course, you'll also be enrolled in this Specialization.
  • Learn new concepts from industry experts
  • Gain a foundational understanding of a subject or tool
  • Develop job-relevant skills with hands-on projects
  • Earn a shareable career certificate

There are 4 modules in this course

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.

This course equips you with practical machine learning skills for real-world healthcare analytics. You will apply supervised, unsupervised, and temporal modeling techniques that match common healthcare data realities and clinical use cases. You’ll learn to frame clinical prediction problems, construct features from structured and time-based data, and develop classification and regression models for healthcare settings. You’ll also discover patient subgroups using clustering and dimensionality reduction and interpret patterns in patient populations. Across the course, you’ll focus on interpretability, robustness, and healthcare-appropriate evaluation metrics tied to clinical risk and patient safety. In hands-on labs, you’ll build a Readmission Risk Classifier, cluster patients for phenotype discovery, visualize populations with dimensionality reduction, engineer temporal features for an early warning model, and compare models using ROC, PR, calibration, and threshold-based utility analysis.

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

8 videos3 readings4 assignments1 discussion prompt3 plugins

8 videosTotal 31 minutes
  • Course Introduction3 minutes
  • Specialization Overview3 minutes
  • Turning Clinical Questions into Predictive Modeling Tasks3 minutes
  • Target Leakage and Data Pitfalls in Healthcare Modeling5 minutes
  • Logistic Regression for Clinical Risk Estimation3 minutes
  • Tree-Based Models for Nonlinear Patterns in EHR Data5 minutes
  • Regression Models for Continuous Clinical Outcomes4 minutes
  • Handling Imbalanced and Rare Event Outcomes4 minutes
3 readingsTotal 24 minutes
  • Course Overview2 minutes
  • Lab: Building a Readmission Risk Classifier20 minutes
  • Module Summary: Supervised Learning for Clinical Prediction2 minutes
4 assignmentsTotal 39 minutes
  • Graded Quiz: Supervised Learning for Clinical Prediction21 minutes
  • Practice Quiz: Framing Clinical Problems as Supervised Learning Tasks6 minutes
  • Practice Quiz: Classification Models for Diagnosis and Risk Prediction6 minutes
  • Practice Quiz: Regression Models for Clinical Outcomes6 minutes
1 discussion promptTotal 2 minutes
  • Spotting Predictions in Everyday Questions2 minutes
3 pluginsTotal 10 minutes
  • Reading: How to Make the Most of This Course2 minutes
  • Reading: Advanced Supervised Learning Models and Ensemble Techniques4 minutes
  • Reading: Common Supervised-Learning Applications and Feature Design4 minutes

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

4 videosTotal 19 minutes
  • Use of Clustering Algorithms in Clinical Contexts5 minutes
  • Dimensionality Reduction for Clinical Data Exploration 5 minutes
  • Representation Learning for Complex Clinical Data4 minutes
  • Evaluating Cluster Quality, Stability, and Robustness4 minutes
3 readingsTotal 42 minutes
  • Lab: Clustering Patients for Phenotype Discovery20 minutes
  • Lab: Visualizing Patient Populations with Dimensionality Reduction20 minutes
  • Module Summary: Unsupervised Learning and Patient Phenotyping2 minutes
4 assignmentsTotal 39 minutes
  • Graded Quiz: Unsupervised Learning and Patient Phenotyping21 minutes
  • Practice Quiz: Clustering Methods for Patient Groups6 minutes
  • Practice Quiz: Dimensionality Reduction and Representation Learning6 minutes
  • Practice Quiz: Evaluating Unsupervised Models6 minutes
1 discussion promptTotal 2 minutes
  • Visualizing Patient Populations with Dimensionality Reduction2 minutes
3 pluginsTotal 24 minutes
  • Reading: Design Considerations for Phenotyping Studies4 minutes
  • Activity: Phenotype Detective15 minutes
  • Reading: Case Studies in Data-Driven Phenotyping5 minutes

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

4 videosTotal 19 minutes
  • Working with Irregular Clinical Time Series4 minutes
  • Classical Forecasting Approaches in Healthcare5 minutes
  • Evaluating Models with ROC and PR Curves5 minutes
  • Calibration, Thresholding, and Clinical Utility5 minutes
3 readingsTotal 42 minutes
  • Lab: Building Temporal Features for an Early Warning Model20 minutes
  • Lab: Evaluating and Comparing Clinical Prediction Models20 minutes
  • Module Summary: Time Series Modeling and Model Evaluation2 minutes
4 assignmentsTotal 39 minutes
  • Graded Quiz: Time Series Modeling and Model Evaluation21 minutes
  • Practice Quiz: Temporal Data and Feature-Based Approaches6 minutes
  • Practice Quiz: Classical Time-Series Models6 minutes
  • Practice Quiz: Evaluation and Clinical Validation6 minutes
1 discussion promptTotal 2 minutes
  • Using Temporal Features in Early Warning Models2 minutes
4 pluginsTotal 29 minutes
  • Reading: Feature Engineering for Temporal Modeling4 minutes
  • Reading: State-Space Models, Kalman Filters, and Survival Analysis5 minutes
  • Activity: A Week in the Emergency Department (ED)15 minutes
  • Reading: Model Interpretability5 minutes

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

1 videoTotal 4 minutes
  • Course Summary4 minutes
3 readingsTotal 8 minutes
  • Final Project Overview5 minutes
  • Congratulations and Next Steps2 minutes
  • Team and Acknowledgments1 minute
1 assignmentTotal 30 minutes
  • Final Exam: Machine Learning for Healthcare Applications30 minutes
1 peer reviewTotal 45 minutes
  • Final Project: Designing an Early Warning System for Clinical Deterioration45 minutes
1 discussion promptTotal 2 minutes
  • Comparing Your Work2 minutes
1 pluginTotal 9 minutes
  • Course Glossary: Machine Learning for Healthcare Applications9 minutes

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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. 

You’ll use discrimination, calibration, and clinical utility metrics to assess whether models are both accurate and clinically meaningful. You’ll also apply validation methods that preserve temporal order and patient-level separation to reduce leakage and better reflect real deployment conditions.

No. In this course, machine learning models are treated as decision-support tools that help identify risk patterns or patient subgroups. You’ll learn to interpret outputs carefully, evaluate them with clinically meaningful metrics, and communicate limitations, while recognizing that final clinical judgment remains with qualified healthcare professionals.

Yes. You’ll complete a hands-on final project focused on designing an early warning system for clinical deterioration. You’ll transform raw clinical data, including time-stamped vital signs, encounter history, and chronic condition indicators, into temporal features. You will also train and evaluate prediction models and interpret results using clinically meaningful metrics. You’ll also take a final exam covering the key course concepts.

You’ll use Jupyter Notebooks via Google Colab, so you can run all labs in a browser without special installations. You’ll also need a Google Workspace or Gmail account to access Colab. A standard laptop/desktop and reliable internet are enough to complete the coursework.

To access the course materials, assignments and to earn a Certificate, you will need to purchase the Certificate experience when you enroll in a course. You can try a Free Trial instead, or apply for Financial Aid. The course may offer 'Full Course, No Certificate' instead. This option lets you see all course materials, submit required assessments, and get a final grade. This also means that you will not be able to purchase a Certificate experience.

When you enroll in the course, you get access to all of the courses in the Specialization, and you earn a certificate when you complete the work. Your electronic Certificate will be added to your Accomplishments page - from there, you can print your Certificate or add it to your LinkedIn profile.

Yes. In select learning programs, you can apply for financial aid or a scholarship if you can’t afford the enrollment fee. If fin aid or scholarship is available for your learning program selection, you’ll find a link to apply on the description page.

Financial aid available,

¹ Some assignments in this course are AI-graded. For these assignments, your data will be used in accordance with Coursera's Privacy Notice.