

Ask HN: Good ways to become a professional data miner? - Arkanin

HN,<p>First of all, I'm astonished by the overall level of intelligence and tech saavy here. I am in the company of truly brilliant people, which is why I have come here with my questions.<p>I am probably among the least of you: I have a B.S. in Management Information Systems. It's sort of a mcCompsci degree. I have been out of school and working as a programmer (web front-end, proprietary middle-tier backend for our application, using the ANSI SQL 92 standard for Oracle, SQL and DB2) for two years.<p>My biggest accomplishment at this company has been writing an advanced search function that requires very dynamic and robust SQL that is generated on the fly. In the process, I have learned that I am exceptional at querying, manipulating, and otherwise shaping data into something usable. I also have a natural knack for statistics -- I played online poker to make about $7 an hour in college, and have been able to coast through probability classes and make straight As on pure intuition, without memorizing formulas.<p>Because of these two talents I have, I am seriously considering trying to build a long-term career as a data miner. My company has a data mining group that I might be able to move into if I can build the credentials and establish the cred.<p>I would very much like to go back to school and receive a master's degree in something. Appealling options are computer science, statistics, and psychology. I would also like to learn new, valuable skills, and perhaps earn certifications, but I'm not sure what.<p>My question for you is -- what are my best options, if I want to move into a data mining / data shaping role?
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gtani
I would learn thoroughly lib/frameworks like "R" (and ggplot2, very cool),
weka and the python suite numpy / scipy, matplotlib

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look at all the books out now. I think Witten/Franke (authors of weka) was the
first one titled "Data Mining" but there's a slew of htem, read Amazon reviews

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hit the blogosphere

[http://www.dataminingblog.com/2009/01/30/three-new-data-
mini...](http://www.dataminingblog.com/2009/01/30/three-new-data-mining-
blogs/)

<http://www.decisionstats.com/>

