New to ML & AI

New to ML & AI

Hi,

I'm new to ML but interested to find out more. Does anyone have any suggestions for where to start with resources to help get started?

I'm from a BI background and have worked with R at a basic level so I'm not starting from scratch but would love to start levelling up my DataRobot skills!

3 Replies

Hi Stuart, and welcome to the ML gang!

Good place to start is datarobot themselves and one of their courses - see here https://www.datarobot.com/education/all-courses/. The Essentials course is actually focused very much on the basic principles rather than the technical details alone, and is great for understanding "why" rather than just how - which really helps I think!

They also have a free virtual conference in June, which includes a day of free training topics: https://aiworldwide.datarobot.com/

The main thing though, is to just do a project from start to finish.

Outside of DataRobot, another excellent resource for beginners is Kaggle, a site that started as a place to host data science competitions and has now evolved into an community of users, example datasets, and free courses  https://www.kaggle.com/.

I suggest you do the machine learning micro course for an overview then take on the titanic project. The titanic dataset is one that nearly everyone that has studied data science has looked at, don't know why, but it just lends itself very well to lots of missing data and a variety of types, perfect!

So Kaggle leans very much towards Python these days, which is actually very easy to get a grip of if you have some IT knowledge especially BI development. However, you mentioned you are already comfortable in R

There are great options for R, I completed a great one at datacamp a while ago (sadly no longer there) https://www.datacamp.com/courses/

I've personally seen R used more academically, so I'd take a look at MooC's: https://www.edx.org/search?utm_source=mooc.org&utm_medium=landing-page&utm_campaign=mooc-banner-cta These are online courses made free by universities around the world.

Coursera is similar, and although I've never taken his courses, I have heard great things about https://www.coursera.org/instructor/andrewng Andrew Ng, who's Machine learning course has been taken by millions of people

Erica

I'd also highly recommend fast.ai from Jeremy Howard. Not only is he a leading researcher in the field, but he applies a top down learning which means you'll see (motivating) results / models immediately then fill in the theory as you progress.

Just visited https://www.fast.ai/ - hadn't seen that one @duncanrenfrow !

What I like is that while it's video based, all the videos come fully transcribed, so us hard of hearing don't miss out🙂

Erica