101–110 of 144 posts
I can't answer the question directly, but I will say this: machine learning is a lot of applied math. Suppose you are setting up a convolutional network to recognize some special object for a company. You will need to understand that math to know what parameters to tweak. Is it the learning rate? Is it the way you randomized the weights? Is it the activation function? Although, in fairness, I don't think even a PhD l…
To tag on to this question a little bit. If someone wanted to teach themselves, even without the purpose of getting a job. What books / references would be recommended? I saw a mention to David Barber's book in one of the threads here, but what else?
Also don't read any book because it is free, Barber book is heavy in maths, you need at least a college level calculus and advanced statistics/ probability course to understand it.
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I work for a technical statistical team in the financial world, we've been hiring PHDs lately to my team which has just meant exactly what this comment points out. I do a lot of the grunt work of getting the data sourced, cleaned and ready and am called the 'data wizard' and other such annoying names. What's frustrating is I can run the last lines of code and read and understand the output of the last step, but as th…
Sounds more like a "data monkey" (no offense)
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I work for a technical statistical team in the financial world, we've been hiring PHDs lately to my team which has just meant exactly what this comment points out. I do a lot of the grunt work of getting the data sourced, cleaned and ready and am called the 'data wizard' and other such annoying names. What's frustrating is I can run the last lines of code and read and understand the output of the last step, but as th…
It sucks that you are doing the boring data cleansing job. And those people with degrees do the more interesting higher level analysis.
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While this sounds rational, I don't think that's how it works in most cases. Those who do the hiring usually prefer covering themselves by hiring someone with a degree rather than having to explain how they hired you because you made millions to someone else in the past. Also while we understand the hacker culture, many only understand "degree > job", they can't comprehend why you don't have a degree if you are so go…
> While this sounds rational, I don't think that's how it works in most cases. Those who do the hiring usually prefer covering themselves by hiring someone with a degree rather than having to explain how they hired you because you made millions to someone else in the past. Definitely not my experience. I can count on one hand the number of employers who didn't want to proceed because of a lack of degree.
On a related topic, I'm graduating with a master's in (computational) physics, and am already incredibly insecure about not having a PhD as many of the data science positions seem to prefer those. Would a four year PhD, let's say in ML, be a worthwhile investment from a data science career point of view?
- Getting Phd is a long, unpredictable process that can take anywhere 4~8 years. Data Science may be hot right now, but it is not necessarily true by the time you graduate.
- You will pay a ton of opportunity cost doing Phd. For the same amount of time, you can earn so much money and learn on the job.
- Phd doesn't give you the real world industry experiences. I know a lot of fellow doctors who are trying to transition to data science but struggling.
I would say you should polish your programming skills and get hired as a software engineer in big data related field. Then involve in some internal data science projects and transition into data science.
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> While this sounds rational, I don't think that's how it works in most cases. Those who do the hiring usually prefer covering themselves by hiring someone with a degree rather than having to explain how they hired you because you made millions to someone else in the past. Definitely not my experience. I can count on one hand the number of employers who didn't want to proceed because of a lack of degree.
By that, do you mean <=5 of them, or given that your hand has 5 bits, <32 of them?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> While this sounds rational, I don't think that's how it works in most cases. Those who do the hiring usually prefer covering themselves by hiring someone with a degree rather than having to explain how they hired you because you made millions to someone else in the past. Definitely not my experience. I can count on one hand the number of employers who didn't want to proceed because of a lack of degree.
By that, do you mean <=5 of them, or given that your hand has 5 bits, <32 of them?