Last Updated on June 7, 2016 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 this out. He started out as a machine learning beginner and finished up as a “master” level Kaggle competitor […]

Last Updated on April 4, 2018 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 is the mapping between machine learning algorithms and problems? What are the best parameters for a machine learning algorithm? There […]

Last Updated on July 5, 2019 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 model the rating of the players from historical games and propagating those ratings into the future to make predictions. […]

Last Updated on June 7, 2016 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 a wide array of tasks that require some skill in data mining and machine learning in business from data […]

Last Updated on September 5, 2016 It is easy to feel overwhelmed with the large numbers of machine learning algorithms. There are so many to choose from, it is hard to know where to start and what to try. The choice can be paralyzing. You need to get over this fear and start. There is no magic book or course that is going to tell you what algorithm to use and when. In fact, in practice you cannot know this […]

Last Updated on June 7, 2016 I get a lot of questions about machine learning via email and I love answering them. I get to see what real people are doing and help to make a difference. (Do you have a question about machine learning? Contact me). In this post I highlight a few of the interesting questions I have received recently and summarize my answers. Machine Learning Q&APhoto by Angelo Amboldi, some rights reserved Why does my spam classifier […]

Last Updated on April 19, 2018 How do you become a data scientist? I think that really depends on where you are now and what you really want to do as a data scientist. Nevertheless, DataCamp posted an infographic recently that described 8 easy steps to becoming a data scientist. In this post I want to highlight and review DataCamp’s infographic. How to become a data scientist A portion of the infographic posted on the DataCamp blog What is a […]

Last Updated on August 15, 2020 What skills do you need to be a data scientist? I read an interesting data-driven approach to answering this question in the book Doing Data Science: Straight Talk from the Frontline. In this post I summarize this self-assessment approach that you can use to evaluate your strengths as a data scientist and where you might fit into an amazing data science team. You can use applied machine learning practitioner as a synonym for data […]

Last Updated on June 7, 2016 You can rise up and take on your desire to become an a machine learning practitioner and data scientist. You have to work hard, learn the skills and demonstrate that you can deliver results, but you don’t need a fancy degree or a fancy background. In this post I want to demonstrate that this is possible and even common. You will discover that top managers and CEOs are looking at results and not backgrounds […]

Last Updated on June 7, 2016 How do you get started in machine learning, specifically Deep Learning? This question was asked recently in the machine learning sub-reddit. Specifically, the original poster of the question had completed the Coursera Machine Learning course but felt like they did not have enough of a background to get started in Deep Learning. I wrote a lengthy reply that I think may be helpful more generally, for other people in the same situation that are […]