machine learning
Welcome! I'm really excited to help you start your journey into machine learning. Before we dive into the concepts, I'd love to learn a little bit about you so I can tailor everything perfectly to your needs.
To help me customize this session, could you tell me a little about your background? For example, do you have any prior programming or math experience, and what is your main motivation for wanting to learn machine learning?
I have some coding/math background and want to build projects.
That's fantastic. Having a solid footing in coding and math is going to give you a massive head start, and focusing on building real projects is absolutely the best way to make the concepts stick.
Your path
Core Foundations & Prerequisites
Applied Machine Learning Process
Building a Portfolio & Practical Projects
What is Machine Learning?
To kick things off, let's look at how we normally write software versus how we do it in machine learning.
In traditional programming, you write the rules yourself. For instance, if you want to build a spam filter, you might write a long list of manual rules like: "If the email contains the word 'free' and has three exclamation points, mark it as spam." This is highly restrictive and falls apart the moment spammers change their spelling or tactics.
With , we flip this process on its head. Instead of writing the rules, we feed the computer a massive pile of data (like 10,000 emails already marked as spam or not spam) and let the algorithm figure out the patterns and rules all by itself.