How can one can aim for a career in machine learning?

Question

I'm interested in various machine learning methods and wonder how can I aim for a career in the field. What are most basic skills to have?

I mean the matters strictly connected to the machine learning - not programming or libraries.

Answer 1

Machine Learning is a really big field. Depending on what exactly you want to do, there might be huge differences.

Having said that, the following skills are helpful:

• Programming, especially Python / C++
• Frameworks like TensorFlow, sklearn, Torch, ...
• Algorithms like neural networks (especially gradient descent), SVM, decision trees, clustering algorithms, Q-Learning, ...
• Mathematics (e.g. probability theory / statistics, linear algebra, analysis for calculating gradients

Knowing how to program the GPU directly (CUDA) is probably not always necessary, but certainly a big bonus.

In case you're interested what you learn at KIT (Karlsruhe, Germany) in an introductory machine learning course, see my blog post for exam preparation (I'm sorry, it is mostly in German).

Online Courses

There are lots of online material for machine learning. For example an Coursera ML course

Answer 2

I have already answered similar questions here and here

So, that would help you get an idea of how you need to design your own learning path.

The reason why I said that this question is opinion-based is:

Data Science is a huge domain in itself, and attaining complete knowledge of everything in it, is close to impossible.

So, if I am interested in pursuing the concept of Neural Networks alone, and subsequently Deep Learning; then my learning path would be completely different to someone who wants to learn a different concept like time series.

And so does that of someone who wants to learn some other concept. The concepts might be intertwined, but something which I absolutely require in my learning path might not be necessary to someone else's.

So, those above resources are a rough guide to get started.

In addition to that, here is a list of conferences and podcasts of Data Science, which help you with your learning.

And also keep an eye on the beginner tag here.

Additional reading:

Applying machine learning in a real world example A really good neural networks and deep learning book