Machine Learning for Healthcare Applications
Keep adding new skills with 10,000+ programs for $239 (usually $399). Save now.
Machine Learning for Healthcare Applications
This course is part of Data Science for Healthcare Specialization
Instructors: Ramesh Sannareddy
Included with
Ask Coursera
Recommended experience
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
- Data Preprocessing
- Time Series Analysis and Forecasting
- Feature Engineering
- Decision Tree Learning
- Predictive Modeling
- Model Evaluation
- Applied Machine Learning
- Predictive Analytics
- Unsupervised Learning
- Logistic Regression
- Forecasting
- Machine Learning Methods
- Model Training
- Machine Learning Algorithms
- Health Informatics
- Supervised Learning
- Clinical Informatics
- Machine Learning
- Dimensionality Reduction
Tools you'll learn
Details to know
February 2026
See how employees at top companies are mastering in-demand skills
Build your subject-matter expertise
- 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 videos•Total 31 minutes
- Course Introduction•3 minutes
- Specialization Overview•3 minutes
- Turning Clinical Questions into Predictive Modeling Tasks•3 minutes
- Target Leakage and Data Pitfalls in Healthcare Modeling•5 minutes
- Logistic Regression for Clinical Risk Estimation•3 minutes
- Tree-Based Models for Nonlinear Patterns in EHR Data•5 minutes
- Regression Models for Continuous Clinical Outcomes•4 minutes
- Handling Imbalanced and Rare Event Outcomes•4 minutes
3 readings•Total 24 minutes
- Course Overview•2 minutes
- Lab: Building a Readmission Risk Classifier•20 minutes
- Module Summary: Supervised Learning for Clinical Prediction•2 minutes
4 assignments•Total 39 minutes
- Graded Quiz: Supervised Learning for Clinical Prediction•21 minutes
- Practice Quiz: Framing Clinical Problems as Supervised Learning Tasks•6 minutes
- Practice Quiz: Classification Models for Diagnosis and Risk Prediction•6 minutes
- Practice Quiz: Regression Models for Clinical Outcomes•6 minutes
1 discussion prompt•Total 2 minutes
- Spotting Predictions in Everyday Questions•2 minutes
3 plugins•Total 10 minutes
- Reading: How to Make the Most of This Course•2 minutes
- Reading: Advanced Supervised Learning Models and Ensemble Techniques•4 minutes
- Reading: Common Supervised-Learning Applications and Feature Design•4 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 videos•Total 19 minutes
- Use of Clustering Algorithms in Clinical Contexts•5 minutes
- Dimensionality Reduction for Clinical Data Exploration •5 minutes
- Representation Learning for Complex Clinical Data•4 minutes
- Evaluating Cluster Quality, Stability, and Robustness•4 minutes
3 readings•Total 42 minutes
- Lab: Clustering Patients for Phenotype Discovery•20 minutes
- Lab: Visualizing Patient Populations with Dimensionality Reduction•20 minutes
- Module Summary: Unsupervised Learning and Patient Phenotyping•2 minutes
4 assignments•Total 39 minutes
- Graded Quiz: Unsupervised Learning and Patient Phenotyping•21 minutes
- Practice Quiz: Clustering Methods for Patient Groups•6 minutes
- Practice Quiz: Dimensionality Reduction and Representation Learning•6 minutes
- Practice Quiz: Evaluating Unsupervised Models•6 minutes
1 discussion prompt•Total 2 minutes
- Visualizing Patient Populations with Dimensionality Reduction•2 minutes
3 plugins•Total 24 minutes
- Reading: Design Considerations for Phenotyping Studies•4 minutes
- Activity: Phenotype Detective•15 minutes
- Reading: Case Studies in Data-Driven Phenotyping•5 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 videos•Total 19 minutes
- Working with Irregular Clinical Time Series•4 minutes
- Classical Forecasting Approaches in Healthcare•5 minutes
- Evaluating Models with ROC and PR Curves•5 minutes
- Calibration, Thresholding, and Clinical Utility•5 minutes
3 readings•Total 42 minutes
- Lab: Building Temporal Features for an Early Warning Model•20 minutes
- Lab: Evaluating and Comparing Clinical Prediction Models•20 minutes
- Module Summary: Time Series Modeling and Model Evaluation•2 minutes
4 assignments•Total 39 minutes
- Graded Quiz: Time Series Modeling and Model Evaluation•21 minutes
- Practice Quiz: Temporal Data and Feature-Based Approaches•6 minutes
- Practice Quiz: Classical Time-Series Models•6 minutes
- Practice Quiz: Evaluation and Clinical Validation•6 minutes
1 discussion prompt•Total 2 minutes
- Using Temporal Features in Early Warning Models•2 minutes
4 plugins•Total 29 minutes
- Reading: Feature Engineering for Temporal Modeling•4 minutes
- Reading: State-Space Models, Kalman Filters, and Survival Analysis•5 minutes
- Activity: A Week in the Emergency Department (ED)•15 minutes
- Reading: Model Interpretability•5 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 video•Total 4 minutes
- Course Summary•4 minutes
3 readings•Total 8 minutes
- Final Project Overview•5 minutes
- Congratulations and Next Steps•2 minutes
- Team and Acknowledgments•1 minute
1 assignment•Total 30 minutes
- Final Exam: Machine Learning for Healthcare Applications•30 minutes
1 peer review•Total 45 minutes
- Final Project: Designing an Early Warning System for Clinical Deterioration•45 minutes
1 discussion prompt•Total 2 minutes
- Comparing Your Work•2 minutes
1 plugin•Total 9 minutes
- Course Glossary: Machine Learning for Healthcare Applications•9 minutes
Earn a career certificate
Add this credential to your LinkedIn profile, resume, or CV. Share it on social media and in your performance review.
Instructors
Explore more from Machine Learning
- Status: Free Trial
Course
- Status: Free Trial
Course
- Status: PreviewC
Cleveland Clinic
Course
- Status: PreviewN
Northeastern University
Course
Why people choose Coursera for their career
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
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.
