You want to learn machine learning to have more opportunities at work or to get a job. You may already be working as a data scientist or machine learning engineer and looking to improve your skills. It is about as easy to pigeonhole machine learning skills as it is programming skills (you can’t). There is […]
What does it take to do well in competitive machine learning? To really dig into this question, you need to dig into the people that do well. In 2010 I participated in a Kaggle competition to predict the outcome of chess games in the future. It was a fascinating problem because it required you to […]
If You Knew Which Algorithm or Algorithm Configuration To Use, You Would Not Need To Use Machine Learning There is no best machine learning algorithm or algorithm parameters. I want to cure you of this type of silver bullet mindset. I see these questions a lot, even daily: Which is the best machine learning algorithm? What […]
How do you get good at Kaggle competitions? It is a common question I get asked. The best advice for getting started and getting good is to consistently participate in competitions. You cannot help but get better at machine learning. A recent post by Triskelion titled “Reflecting back on one year of Kaggle contests” bares […]
Colorado Reed from Metacademy wrote a great post recently titled “Level-Up Your Machine Learning” to answer the question he often receives of: What should I do if I want to get ‘better’ at machine learning, but I don’t know what I want to learn? In this post you will discover a summary of Colorado recommendations […]
Julia Evans wrote a post recently titled “Machine learning isn’t Kaggle competitions“. It was an interesting post because it pointed out an important truth. If you want to solve business problems using machine learning, doing well at Kaggle competitions is not a good indicator of that skills. The rationale is that the work required to […]
David Mimno is an assistant professor in the Information Sciences department at Cornell University. He has a background and interest in Natural Language Processing (NLP), specifically topic modeling. Notably, he is the chief maintainer of MALLET, the Java-based NLP library. I recently came across a blog post by David titled “Advice for students of machine […]
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 […]
