You have to get your hands dirty. You can read all of the blog posts and watch all the videos in the world, but you’re not actually going to start really get machine learning until you start practicing. The scikit-learn Python library is very easy to get up and running. Nevertheless I see a lot […]
What is the best machine learning algorithm? I get this question a lot. Maybe even daily. Sometimes it’s a general question. I figure people want to make sure they are learning the one true machine learning algorithm and not wasting their time on anything less. Most other times it is with regard to a specific […]
A question that comes up from time to time is: What hardware do I need to practice machine learning? There was a time when I was a student when I was obsessed with more speed and more cores so I could run my algorithms faster and for longer. I have changed my perspective. Big hardware […]
I get a lot of emails asking about how I got interested in machine learning and about my background. I don’t think my story is special or interesting, but I’m happy to share it and honored I’m asked. This post feels a little self-indulgent. I figure it can be the definitive version of my story […]
A question I get asked a lot is: How can I make money with machine learning? You can get a job with your machine learning skills as a machine learning engineer, data analyst or data scientist. That is the goal of a great many people that contact me. There are also other options. In this […]
It is difficult to stay motivated when self-studying machine learning. The standard test datasets can be quite obtuse and disconnected from you and from your everyday life. Boring even. A trick that you might like to use is to find and work on a dataset that matters to you. In this post, we will look at […]
Complete Small Focused Projects and Demonstrate Your Skills A portfolio is typically used by designers and artists to show examples of prior work to prospective clients and employers. Design, art and photography are examples where the work product is creative and empirical, where telling someone you can do it is not valued the same as […]
Identify and Tackle Your Self-Limiting Beliefs and Finally Make Progress I get a lot of email from developers and students looking to get started in machine learning. The first question I ask them is what is stopping them from getting started? I try to get to the heart of what they are struggling with, and almost […]
In this post I lay out a concrete self-study roadmap for applied machine learning that you can use to orient yourself and figure out your next step. I think a lot about frameworks and systematic approaches (as evidenced on my blog). I would consider this post a vast expansion of my previous thoughts on a self-study […]
Data preparation is difficult because the process is not objective, or at least it does not feel that way. Questions like “what is the best form of the data to describe the problem?” are not objective. You have to think from the perspective of the problem you want to solve and try a few different […]
