Ask HN: How does a beginner best spend one week of learning machine learning?

#1

Post by mrborgen » Fri, Apr 24, 2015, 12:50 PM UTC

I'll spend all my time next week studying machine learning. However, I know that it's easy to get lost in overly theoretical material when learning ML.

So I'm interested in some advice on how to best spend my time, given that I'd like to get as much practical knowledge as possible.

Here is the level I'm at now:

I'm currently halfways though Andrew Ng's ML course on Coursera, and will probably finish this within the week. I love the mix of theory an practice this course is based around.

I've also done the Udacity - Intro to Machine Learning, but found it too theoretical.

I kind of understand the basic principles of linear & logistic regression, cost functions and gradient descent & the normal equation.

By the end of the week, I hope to be able to do linear regression using gradient descent on an actual dataset. If so, the week has been very well spent!

My preferred language is Python.

All tips and suggestions are highly appreciated :)

Re: Ask HN: How does a beginner best spend one week of learning machine learning?

#2

Post by drd4 » Fri, Apr 24, 2015, 1:17 PM UTC

This would probably be a good tutorial for you to give a whirl. It's applicable, slowly brings you into the more complex, and python :)

Framework: http://deeplearning.net/software/theano/ Tutorial: http://deeplearning.net/tutorial/gettingstarted.html#getting...

Re: Ask HN: How does a beginner best spend one week of learning machine learning?

#3

Post by chollida1 » Fri, Apr 24, 2015, 2:02 PM UTC

Honestly, with only a week you can't really learn a lot so I'd recommend doing something practical. See the canonical answer here:

http://norvig.com/21-days.html

Go to Kaggle and do one of the competitions.

https://www.kaggle.com/competitions

and reference the wiki for help:

https://www.kaggle.com/wiki/Home

In my opinion, the only way to learn machine learning without a strong foundation is to page in learning. That means you'll need to pick a practical task and just jump into it and find out what you don't know.

If you've never done anything practical, great you'll need to learn about the basic data structures of machine learning.

Find out what a data frame is, what time series analysis is and what data structures you need to do it.

Are you going to do classification or prediction? Pick one and learn some of the basic tools used for it.

Re: Ask HN: How does a beginner best spend one week of learning machine learning?

#4

Post by bjourne » Fri, Apr 24, 2015, 2:48 PM UTC

I got a lot of mileage out of this book: http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Collective-Intelligence-Bu... All his examples are in Python, so if you already know Python it should work well for you. The only minor thing is that there are a few typos here and there in the code, but usually you can just use your common sense and figure out what the author intended.

Re: Ask HN: How does a beginner best spend one week of learning machine learning?

#5

Post by waitingkuo » Fri, Apr 24, 2015, 2:53 PM UTC

The Udacity one (introduction to Machine Learning) is very practical in my mind. It only description some intuition and then show you how to call scikit-learn's function to do some simple machine learning works.

Re: Ask HN: How does a beginner best spend one week of learning machine learning?

#6

Post by ssabev » Fri, Apr 24, 2015, 2:56 PM UTC

Get Rodeo - http://blog.yhathq.com/posts/introducing-rodeo.html And start playing around with the data!

Re: Ask HN: How does a beginner best spend one week of learning machine learning?

#7

Post by mrborgen » Fri, Apr 24, 2015, 3:01 PM UTC

waitingkuo wrote: post #5

The Udacity one (introduction to Machine Learning) is very practical in my mind. It only description some intuition and then show you how to call scikit-learn's function to do some simple machine learning works.

Just realised that I mixed the courses up. The one I did was simply called "Machine Learning" and not "Intro to Machine Learning". Anyway, thanks for the tip, I'll check it out!

Re: Ask HN: How does a beginner best spend one week of learning machine learning?

#8

Post by kdoherty » Fri, Apr 24, 2015, 3:03 PM UTC

Give it more than a week. I didn't realize the significance and implications of lots of really cool ideas in statistical learning for months after I started. It probably won't click right away, but check out scikit-learn for Python if you want a good way to dive into data with great resources.

Re: Ask HN: How does a beginner best spend one week of learning machine learning?

#9

Post by louden » Fri, Apr 24, 2015, 3:03 PM UTC

chollida1 wrote: post #3

Honestly, with only a week you can't really learn a lot so I'd recommend doing something practical. See the canonical answer here: http://norvig.com/21-days.html Go to Kaggle and do one of the competitions. https://www.kaggle.com/competitions and reference the wiki for help: https://www.kaggle.com/wiki/Home In my opinion, the only way to learn machine learning without a strong foundation is to page in learning. That…

I second using kaggle. They have a lot of 'competitions' that are really just learning exercises with a lot of information about the techniques used directly linked to the competition.

Re: Ask HN: How does a beginner best spend one week of learning machine learning?

#10

Post by Emore » Fri, Apr 24, 2015, 3:04 PM UTC

I wrote a machine learning cheat sheet once, as a way to learn when I was in your seat: http://eferm.com/machine-learning-cheat-sheet/

Perhaps the cheat sheet in itself is useful for you, but mostly I'd recommend the process of assembling information in a concise way as a good way to learn.