
Ask HN: How do I get started with applied ML/AI/Deep Learning? - djangovm
Hi HN,<p>Small background: I have a degree in non-comp sci stream, but have been working as a dev&#x2F;lead startups&#x2F;corporates for last 10 years. Currently, I am in one of the big 4s as a SSE, but do not have any background in ML. Tech background would mostly be JVM...<p>So, how do I get started? Languages, technologies, books, projects, anything would help.
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Eridrus
There's lots of books, courses, etc out there, much more than you can possible
get around to reading. Lots of people recommend Andrew Ng's ML course, and
it's a good introduction to the basic ideas, but it's showing it's age a bit
IMO and doesn't prepare you to be a practitioner at all.

Python is pretty much the lingua franca of machine learning, so expect to use
that, and I would recommend Keras as a framework for getting started with deep
learning; it uses TensorFlow (or Theano) under the hood. scikit-learn it the
main non-DL python ML library. You will almost certainly want to use Jupyter
as an interactive Python environment.

Things like WEKA/deeplearning4j exist for the JVM, and they may be necessary
for work, but are not where I would recommend starting.

If you're not aware of Kaggle, it's an ML competition website which hosts
datasets, but also publishes descriptions of winning entries, though you'll
find that deep learning is not what wins everything.

I would also suggest looking at some of the academic papers from conferences
like ICML/NIPS/ICLR or just uploaded to Arxiv (though figuring out which ones
are interesting will be harder to start); many papers are surprisingly
approachable and knowing what mathematical topics are mentioned in cutting
edge papers can help guide your learning.

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djangovm
Thanks!

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madrafi
Python Machine Learning is a great book to start the author made a great
curriculum if you would like to follow it.
[https://sebastianraschka.com/faq/docs/ml-
curriculum.html](https://sebastianraschka.com/faq/docs/ml-curriculum.html)

This is mostly ML if you would like to dive into deep learning I think fast.ai
is the best course for anyone with programming experience and you can also use
the deeplearning.net Tutorial as a side reference. If you have a practical
experience and would love to understand the theory behinds it then Deep
Learning Book is the Bible.

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djangovm
Thanks! looks great

