BASICS OF MACHINE LEARNING

Machine learning is an integral part of many commercial applications and research projects today, in areas ranging from medical diagnosis and treatment to finding your friends on social networks. Many people think that machine learning can only be applied by large companies with extensive research teams. In this book, we want to show you how easy it can be to build machine learning solutions yourself, and how to best go about it. With the knowledge in this book, you can build your own system for finding out how people feel on Twitter, or making predictions about global warming. The applications of machine learning are endless and, with the amount of data available today, mostly limited by your imagination.

Who Should Read This Book?

This book is for current and aspiring machine learning practitioners looking to implement solutions to real-world machine learning problems. This is an introductory book requiring no previous knowledge of machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI).The methods we introduce will be helpful for students and researchers, as well as data scientists working on commercial applications. You will get the most out of the book if you are somewhat familiar with Python and the NumPy and matplotlib libraries.

We made a conscious effort not to focus too much on the math, but rather on the practical aspects of using machine learning algorithms. As mathematics (probability theory, in particular) is the foundation upon which machine learning is built, we won’t go into the analysis of the algorithms in great detail.

Why We Wrote This Book?

There are many books on machine learning and AI. However, all of them are meant for graduate students or Post graduate students in computer science, and they’re full of advanced mathematics. This is in stark contrast with how machine learning is being used, as a commodity tool in research and commercial applications. Today, applying machine learning does not require a Post graduate. However, there are few resources out there that fully cover all the important aspects of implementing machine learning in practice, without requiring you to take advanced math courses. We hope this book will help people who want to apply machine learning without reading up on years’ worth of calculus, linear algebra, and probability theory.