What's the best way to get started with machine learning?

Comments

[nihar]

Obviously I think my Machine learning textbook is pretty good :) However, the current version is admittedly rather hard for beginners. I am actually in the process of writing the second edition, which will ramp up more slowly, making it more accessible to beginners. (I'm also adding new content on deep learning, reinforcement learning, etc.) But it will take me a while to finish (~2 years?).
You can also learn machine learning here: hackr.io/tutorials/learn-machine-l...

In the meantime, there are many good books available. See eg this list: josephmisiti/awesome-machine-learning . One book which I think is particularly good for beginners is Introduction to Statistical Learning, by James, Witten, Hastie and Tibshirani. It has a few references to concepts from frequentist statistics, such as p-values (which you can safely ignore :), and doesn't cover topics such as deep learning or graphical models, but nevertheless it's a good place to start.

[Mac Siri]

If you have the time and the love for online course, I highly recommend Udacity's Intro to Machine Learning. I think this is a great way to get a high-level understanding without digging too deep into the mathematics behind the algorithm.

[Paulo López]

Greetings,

Depending on your background,

Linear Algebra and Calculus is vital to understand what's happening under the hood of the algorithms.

There is plenty of resources online but it can get overwhelming without a plan of attack so my two cents are this:

You can follow this plan created by Siraj

github.com/2-CREATE/Learn_Machine_...

as well as a fast-pace crash course created by Google,

developers.google.com/machine-lear...

Happy learning!

[Igor Rocha]

I found out that usually the best way to get started on a 100% new subject is to take an introductory online course. From there you can decide if you want to keep taking more courses, especially those that offer great coursework (so you can assess how much you've actually learned already), or if you want to dig for tutorials and practice assignmenets.

If you like this approach of taking an online course to start learning Machine Learning, I recommend taking a look at the courses at classpert.com/machine-learning (better than looking into a single provider, they give you a list of all machine learning courses across several providers, which helps you to choose one that better suits you).

Good luck on your learning journey!

[edA‑qa mort‑ora‑y]

Classifying documents, or websites, can be an interesting way to start. Start with a list of domains that you like on a topic, and a bunch of unrelated domains. Now try to build a system that will pick out the other domains you like. This will introduce several of the concepts behind machine learning:

• attribute extraction: picking data out of the websites for use as attributes (this can be as simple as parsing the HTML and pulling out words)
• training: using known good data (a subset of the domains you like) to train the system
• classification: let the system run on the new data. You have only two categories at this point so it should be easy to manually confirm the results.

I'm specifically not including any technologies or programming languages here. All languages have numerous libraries, and just following the concept words, or just tracing machine learning should pick out many. But the above gives the basic outline of what you're trying to do, to help guide the search.

(Note, this basic task doesn't involve neural networks. Don't get side-tracked, at least not yet at least.)

Once you get into it you'll start learning about the statistical models being used, and can start branching off. You can look at classifying more categories. Identifying attributes automatically. Correlating documents to each other. Pattern and behavior prediction.

[Akkiraja]

well the first step to start a career in machine learning is to get hands dirty with python. Then do a detailed course on Udacity ,Coursera or Udemy.
Everybody has their own ways of learning. If you are not good with courses, read some books on machine learning. On onlinecourseing.com/best-machine-l... we have curated all the courses to help you learn machine learning. You can also avail free courses listed on the platform. Also we have listed books on AI and ml along with podcasts and ML communities.
Happy Learning..