There are many paths into the field of machine learning and most start with theory.
If you are a programmer then you already have the skills to decompose problems into their constituent parts and to prototype small projects in order to learn new technologies, libraries and methods. These are important skills for any professional programmer and these skills can be used to get started in machine learning, today.
These are important skills for any professional programmer and these skills can be used to get started in machine learning, today.

Self Study
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You must learn the theory to be effective in machine learning, but you can use your interests and thirst for knowledge motivate you from working examples into mathematical understandings of algorithms.
In this post you will learn four strategies a programmer can follow to get started in machine learning. This is the path of the technician, which is practical and empirical and will require you to perform research and complete experiments in order to build up your own intuitions.
The four strategies are:
- Study a Machine Learning Tool
- Study a Machine Learning Dataset
- Study a Machine Learning Algorithm
- Implement a Machine Learning Algorithm
Read through these strategies and select one that you feel suits you the best, then execute with abandon.
1. Study a Machine Learning Tool
Select a tool or library that you like and learn how to use it well.
I recommend you start with an environment that provides tools for data preparation, machine learning algorithms and the presentation of results. Learning an environment like this will allow you to get good at the process of machine learning end-to-end which is more valuable to you than learning a specific data preparation technique or machine learning algorithm.
Alternatively, perhaps you are interested in a specific technique of family of techniques. You could use this as an opportunity to deep dive into a library or tool that offers these methods and master the technique by mastering the library that supplies access to the technique.
Study a Machine Learning Tool
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Some tactics you could follow for this strategy are:
- Compare and contrast candidate tools from which you could choose.
- Summarize the capabilities of your chosen tool.
- Read and summarize the documentation for the tool.
- Complete text or video tutorials for the tool and summarize the key learning points for each tutorial you complete.
- Create tutorials for features or capabilities of the tool. Select things that you don’t know much about and create write a process for getting a result or record a 5-minute screencast on how to use the feature.
Some environments you should consider include: R, Weka, scikit-learn, waffles, and orange.
2. Study a Machine Learning Dataset
Select a dataset and understand it intimately and discover which algorithm class or type addresses it the best.
I recommend you select a modest sized dataset that fits into memory that may have been well studied before. There are excellent libraries of data sources available for you to browse and choose. Your objective is to understand the underlying problem that the data source represents, the structure in the dataset and the types of solutions that are most suited to the problem.
Use a machine learning or statistical environment to study the dataset. This will allow you to focus on the questions you are seeking to answer about the dataset rather than being distracted with learning about a given technique and learning how to implement it in code.
Study a Machine Learning Dataset
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Some tactics that can help you with your study of an experimental machine learning dataset are:
- Clearly describe the problem that the dataset represents.
- Summarize the data using descriptive statistics.
- Describe the structures you observe in the data and hypothesize about the relationships in the data.
- Spot test a handful of popular machine learning algorithms on the dataset and discover which general class performs better than others
- Tune well-performing algorithms and discover the algorithm and algorithm configuration that performs well on the problem
Some repositories of high-quality datasets you may like to consider are: UCI ML Repository, Kaggle and data.gov.
3. Study a Machine Learning Algorithm
Select an algorithm and understand it intimately and discover parameter configurations that are stable across different datasets.
I recommend that you start with an algorithm of modest complexity. Select an algorithm that is well understood, has many open source implementations from you to choose from and has few parameters for you to explore. Your objective is to build up intuitions for how the algorithm performs across a range of problems and parameter configurations.
Use a machine learning environment or library. This will allow you to focus on the behaviors of the algorithm as a “system” as opposed to concerning yourself with canonical mathematical descriptions and reference literature.
Study a Machine Learning Algorithm
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Some tactics you can use when studying your chosen machine learning algorithm are:
- Summarize the parameters of the system and the expected influences they have on the algorithm.
- Select a range of datasets suited to the algorithm that are likely to elicit varied behaviors.
- Select algorithm parameter configurations that you believe will elicit varied behaviors from the system and list the behaviors you may expect from the system.
- Consider the behaviors of an algorithm that could be monitored as the algorithm is run over iterations of the algorithms update process or other interval of time.
- Design small experiments using one or more combinations of datasets, algorithm configurations and behavior measures in order to answer a specific question and report results.
Your studies can be as simple or as complex as you like. At the higher-end you can explore so-called heuristics or rules of thumb for applying algorithms and empirically demonstrate whether they have merit and if so under what circumstances they correlate with successful outcomes.
Some algorithms you may consider to start with include: least squares linear regression, logistic regression, k-nearest neighbor classification, perceptron
4. Implement a Machine Learning Algorithm
Select an algorithm and implement or port an existing implementation to a language of your choice.
Select an algorithm of modest complexity to implement. I recommend performing some detailed research on the algorithm you which to implement, or select an implementation you like and port it to your chosen target programming language.
Implementing an algorithm by hand from scratch is a great way to learn about the myriad of micro-decisions that have to be made in transforming an algorithm description into a functioning system. By repeating this process with multiple algorithms you will quickly gain an intuition for how to read the mathematical descriptions of algorithms in research papers and books.
Implement a Machine Learning Algorithm
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Five tactics that may help you when implementing machine learning algorithms from scratch are:
- Start by porting. Porting an open source algorithm implementation from one language to another will teach you how the algorithm is implemented and make it your own. It is the fastest way to get started and is highly recommended.
- Select one algorithm description to work from and collect other algorithm descriptions to support your disambiguation of the primary reference material
- Do not be afraid to reach out to algorithm authors, paper authors or even algorithm implementation authors to ask questions to help you disambiguate your understanding of the algorithm description.
- Read lots of implementations of your target algorithm. Learn how different programmers interpret the algorithm description and turned it into code.
- Do not get caught up on advanced methods. Many machine learning algorithms use advanced optimization methods in their core. Do not try to reimplement these methods unless that is the point of your project. Use a library that provides an optimization algorithm or use a simpler optimization algorithm that is easy to implement (like gradient descent) or is available to you in a library.
Small Projects Methodology
The four strategies being to a methodology I call “small projects”. It is an approach you can use to very quickly build up practical skills in technical fields of study, like machine learning. The general idea is that you design and execute on small projects that target a specific question you want to answer.
Small projects are small in a few dimensions to ensure that they completed and that you extract the learning benefits and move onto the next project. Below are constraints you should consider imposing on your projects:
- Small in time: A project should not take any longer than 5-15 hours from inception to presentation of results. This will allow you to complete a small project in a week of nights and weekend time away from your 9-5 job.
- Small in scope: A project should address the most narrow version of the question you are interested in and still be meaningful. For example, rather than addressing the problem “write a program that will tell me if tweet will be retweeted” in the general case, address the problem just for a specific twitter account for a given time period.
- Small in resources: A project should be able to be completed on your desktop or laptop with a connection to the internet. You should not need exotic software, web infrastructure, or third party data or service. Collect the data you need to file, load it into memory and attack your narrow question using open source tools.
Additional Project Tips
The principle of these strategies is to take action and make use of your programmer skill set. Below are three tips to help you adjust your mindset in order to take action:
- Write down what you learn. I recommend that you have a tangible work product for every step you take. This could be a note in a journal, a tweet, a blog post or an open source project. Each work product acts as an anchor and a milestone.
- Do not write code unless that is the purpose of the project. This tip is not obvious but may be the biggest in terms of accelerating your understanding of machine learning.
- The goal is for you to learn something not to create a unique resource. No one will read your studies or tutorials or notes on an algorithm, ignore this for now. They are your perspective and your work product to demonstrate that you now know something.
Summary
Here are the size strategies again with a clear one-liner for each to help you choose the one that is right for you.
- Study a Machine Learning Tool: Select a tool or library that you like and learn how to use it well.
- Study a Machine Learning Dataset: Select a dataset and understand it intimately and discover which algorithm class or type addresses it the best.
- Study a Machine Learning Algorithm: Select an algorithm and understand it intimately and discover parameter configurations that are stable across different datasets.
- Implement a Machine Learning Algorithm: Select an algorithm and implement or port an existing implementation to a language of your choice.
Pick One!
Which strategy would you choose and what will be your first step? Pick one and declare your intentions in a comment below.
I am trying to learn the machine learning, but i do not know how to start it
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6455048911974473728/
Brilliant
Thanks, I’m glad you like it. Let me know if you take on a project.
i like it, i pick 3
Very useful post, Thanks json!!!
Glad to here it Ben, thanks.
Hi,
Very useful and informative. I usually follow the similar pattern and always try to port first because it gives me confidence.
Thanks
Great tip, thanks Muhammad.
Great post Jason. Very useful set of tips. Thanks
Good stuff…
Another small project is to scale a section of code — recently ran into scenario where sample/training/experimenting data set worked “fine” but when working with full data was too slow to be of use. So, focused simply on efficiency of something known to work and produce desired outcomes.
cheers
Thanks Jason for such lucid description of such an interesting domain like Machine Learning. I’m mulling on all the four ways but hopefully I’m feeling starting with 1 and transitioning into 4 will be really interesting… Thanks a lot for the insight!
Thanks for the reference in your email. I really like the small project methodology, I will definitely try it.
Your insight that you should not write code unless it is the purpose of the project might get me over my obsession to always create reusable code. I hope it works!
Thanks for the tips.
Thanks Andreas, good luck mate!
This write up is helpful and I am encouraged that I can achieve my goal in ML. Thank you, Jason.
You are very welcome Sunday! We appreciate the feedback and support.
Nice tips!!!! Many thanks!Nice
Great post..Thank u very much!
I was lost . Thanks for an eye opener article.
It is a very nice n useful
article ..
can u pls mail me a project on pattern recognition and machine learning preferably in python language
I need this for a reference to my project…
It will be very helpfull
Thanks and regards
Great post I am moving towards 2
Hi,
Really great post thanks exactly what I was looking for. Moreover, I have just bought the “Small Project Methodolgy” but I have not received any download link . Please provide it.
Regards
Gianfranco
I have emailed you privately about this.
your every writing is awesome.
Hello Jason
your website is Awesome!! and i really utilize and enjoy your posts. Thanks
Super informative stuff. Major Thanks!!!
Helpful and the links are great places to learn from.
I am a begineer.Please help me decide a project
Hey Thanks.. I need the compiler dataset for my project which is “Compiler optimization using machine learning”. I have searched everywhere.. i didn’t find it… If you know then Help me please.. it’ll really helpful
I want to install one server to serve the research H2O machine learning
are looking forward to a little help from you
thank
Hey, have you made progress with your H2O machine learning research? How is it coming along?
this will be my first ml project, that i’m doing by myself, the tools i decided to focus on are scikit-learn, and weka (java) i’m think i’ll build a spam filter as i am a beginner,
which one would you advice python or java?
i know both languages pretty well, thanks.
python!
Because it has vast libraries to work on!
can u please suggest me a small project on weka
Consider the Iris dataset:
https://machinelearningmastery.com/how-to-run-your-first-classifier-in-weka/
This is very helpful, Jason. Thank you very much.
I chose Weka.
Thanks Jim.
Hi Jason,
MachingLearningMastery.com show us how to be better humans.
By sharing.
You have advancing man and machine tremendously.
May your children learn from you.
Thanks Usman.
Please I’m a novice, nevertheless willing to learn. I just want to enroll for my PhD and want something related to machine learning. I don’t know if anyone can help me with the research topics.
This is a topic I have in mind; “Market value of a product using Machine Learning techniques” I don’t know if it is qualified as a topic for PhD in the field of machine learning.
My aim is to study a particular product for the period of time and determine the future demands of such product based on materials, patronage, price etc
The best person to talk to about phd topics is your advisor.
Hello,
Highly useful post.I am a beginner in machine learning and was looking forward for a proper strategy to follow.Now I feel greatly helped through this amazing post of yours.Thanks so much!:):):):)
You’re welcome Grace.
Thank you Jason, You are awesome. I will go with “Study a Machine Learning Algorithm” and that would be perceptron.
Sounds great, good luck Eudie.
Great effort Jasn;
Anticipated Thanks. I have started learning weka.
Glad to hear it Khalid.
Hello Everyone and Dear Admin (Mr. Jason Brownlee)
I am a master’s degree student in Electronics but by making use of Machine Learning Algorithm for Data Fusion. I was looking for some ans and fortunately found very useful topics in your webpage. Now, I have a question. I am working on a research project which is addressed in supervised learning structure and It is basically a Classification problem using Ensemble learning system that combines base classifiers in belief function framework (Dempster-Shafer Theory). I am looking for an applicable database compatible with my project for handling data with imperfect labels. Could you suggest a suitable database for my work that it would be new and challenging in trends ?
Thank You in Advance
Hi Jason could please help me in data fusion domain I wanted to implement one of the machine learning algorithms, any good reference. Can mail if possible?
Sorry Amit, I don’t know about data fusion.
highly helpful this post
I’m glad you found it useful Nill.
Very helpful , thankyou!
I’m glad to hear that Mohammad.
I want to build a project in machine learning please guide me any good or simple topic.
“Do not write code unless that is the purpose of the project” – could you please elaborate on this? Not clear for me.
Use machine learning libraries and other libraries as much as possible, do not code things from scratch unless you want to – to learn how to.
Study a Machine Learning Tool:
Nice.
I picked number 1: study a machine learning tool.
Very nice!
This article is very useful and informative.
I am a student and i chose to do project on text classifiers, could you mail me an example of text classifiers so that i can use it as reference for my project.
It is quite tough understanding the algorithm and implementing it, so it would be a great help if u have some links where i can study about this.
I will have posts on text classification on the blog soon. They are scheduled.
I checked how to make a small naive bayes code to fit a classifier and predict it but in that I only gave a small array of features to fit and label and the accuracy was also based on that. How do I use the UCI ml datasets for fitting a classifier.
I will be very thankful if you can please help me. I am a novice in Machine Learning.
Thanks
I have many tutorials on my blog showing how, perhaps start here:
https://machinelearningmastery.com/start-here/#python
I pick the last one. I work on RNN and want to implement it.
Great!
Now I have more confident about ML and very keen to learn ML . Please keep post more like this.
Thanks.
can you email a small project problem for the starters
Here are some ideas:
https://machinelearningmastery.com/practice-machine-learning-with-small-in-memory-datasets-from-the-uci-machine-learning-repository/
I have to do six month research for my last semester in college . I want to do that in text summarization in machine learning using python. I did followed some tutorials and have an idea about machine learning algorithm. Can you please mail me some projects for text summarization ? How should I proceed with the research?
I have some posts on the topic here:
https://machinelearningmastery.com/?s=text+summarization&submit=Search
Thanks 🙂
I think the strategy that I find the most appealing is picking some dataset that looks promising/interesting and start from there. I also like the approach of implementing an algorithm from scratch because it is the software equivalent of disarming a device to know its inner pieces and how they work and then assembling it back again!
Do you still use the approach described in this post even though you have many years of experience? Or have you developed quicker/better methodologies to grasp concepts more efficiently?
Good question.
Yes, I still code things from scratch to understand them. I still apply algorithms to datasets in order to learn how to use them effectively.
I like your article very much . I am new to ML want to know about the tools and dataset to be used . I want to create a mini project on ML. I want to work using python language . Please guide me for this and provide me the basic ideas .
Thank you , for sharing .
You can start here:
https://machinelearningmastery.com/start-here/
You can find a list of machine learning projects here : https://deeplink.ml/projects/
Thanks for sharing.
awesome work jason
Thanks.
Thanks a lot for providing us these strategies .
I think I’m choosing the first one : Study a Machine Learning Tool.
because I’m trying to find small real project that I can walk through using a library to understand how the machine learning really works.
Very nice.
I have some more on tools here:
https://machinelearningmastery.com/machine-learning-tools/
thanks
You’re welcome.
Thank you so much. Feeling so motivated after reading the post. Each and every bit of the post is so precious! Thanks again.
I’m happy it helped!
It’s gorgeous!!!Jason…Btw I like your writting style a lot!
Thanks Jon!
Amazing website! <3
Thanks.
Thank Jason for this great leverage. I will start with the number 3 option.
Thanks.
Thank you for all the information, you have no idea how useful are all your post and how much I’ve been learning thanks to you.
Thanks, I’m glad they help.
Nice and very helpful article. It gave me a path to follow. I will work on all the four strategies and will update soon
Thanks.
Good luck with your project!
I like it. I pick 4th.
Nice work!
Thank you so much Jason. You just gave me a path to follow and I will keep on coming to these steps over and over again until I learn the basics of all four.
Btw, wanted to write one thing. There is a person named Jason Stephenson who had some wonderful guided meditation and helped me calm my anxiety and the next Jason (you) has helped to calm my anxiety related to Machine Learning.
Thank you so much.
You’re welcome.
You are such a wonderful guide Jason. Thanks for this valuable information.
Thank you for your kind words!
Hi Jason, this is one of the best posts I have read for people wants to get into Machine learning.
I was struggling to understand what do I need to learn to start understanding machine learning but you have made so clear.
I am a lot more clear now.
Thanks again for such a wonderful post.
Thanks, I’m happy it helps!
Dear Jason, thanks for your nice post. Really you every post is very helpful for me.
I am interested to start with option 2 that is studying a Machine Learning Dataset.
Best regards
* Your every post is helpful for me. Thank you Jason.
Thanks!
Very good suggestion,
specially laying out a project plan at the outset that is measurable in objective, duration, scope etc
and a tangible definition of expected outcome.
Thank you, Jason
You are very welcome Anandan! Keep up the great work!
very helpful, thank you.
You are very welcome kavana!
Very relevant
Thank you Matthew for your feedback and support! We appreciate it!