There are tons of great machine learning courses out there, but it can be hard to know which one to start with, or which one has the most value for your time and money. This article will give you the lowdown on some of the best free machine learning courses available today, so you can get started on the path to becoming an expert! (Note: The links in this article are affiliate links.) The Best Free Machine Learning Course
Andrew Ng’s Coursera Course
Table of Contents
Andrew Ng, a Stanford professor and former head of Baidu’s AI lab, teaches a free introductory machine learning course that provides an excellent introduction to using machine learning in your own projects. The first three lessons of Ng’s class introduce machine learning concepts and teach you how to use libraries like Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow. The final lesson is a project where you apply what you’ve learned to real-world data sets.
Python-based Introduction to Machine Learning
Invented in 1988 by Tom Mitchell, machine learning is a generic term for algorithms that enable machines to learn from data without being explicitly programmed. Algorithms such as neural networks are used to help computers sift through piles of information (aka big data) and make predictions based on what they’ve learned.
Neural Networks and Deep Learning
This 8-week introductory course provides an overview of neural networks and deep learning. It touches on theory, but it focuses mainly on programming exercises and projects. The deeplearning.ai program runs weekly for eight weeks, with instructors in California, London, and Hong Kong.
Getting Data
One of machine learning’s primary uses is to aid in making predictions. To use machine learning, you must have data with which to work. The most common way of obtaining data for a machine-learning project is to record new information as it comes in. Say, for example, that you run a pizza shop and want to identify which customers are likely to leave tips.
Exploratory Data Analysis
When you’re starting a new project, it can be helpful to spend time exploring your data and getting familiar with its structure. If you have access to data in a CSV file, tools like R Studio or Microsoft Excel can help you visualize your data by building graphs or running some basic statistics on it. But if you’re dealing with larger datasets, these simple solutions won’t scale—you may need a free solution that allows for real-time exploration.
Regression Analysis
Regression is a statistical analysis that can be used to find patterns or make predictions. The algorithms used in regression are important tools in data mining, machine learning and predictive analytics. In statistics, we often talk about linear regression because it’s easier to understand and interpret. In machine learning and data mining however, it’s more common to use non-linear regression. Therefore, I’ll first discuss linear regression.
Classification Problems
These are problems in which we wish to categorize each data point into one of two or more classes. An example is spam detection: We wish to determine whether an email is spam (unsolicited bulk email) or not.
Clustering Problems
The k-means algorithm is an iterative method for partitioning data into a pre-specified number of clusters. It begins by assigning every point to its own cluster and then repeatedly assigns points to whichever cluster is closest until it no longer makes any progress. The algorithm can be run in either parallel or serial. Parallel versions can be more computationally expensive, but they tend to be faster because they don’t lock rows in memory as often.
Outlier Detection Problems
In order to find outliers, you need to first determine what exactly an outlier is. Is it a large value? A small value? Values that deviate from a certain distribution? These are all examples of outlier detection problems and they can be solved using slightly different methods. In general, though, your aim is to identify points in your data that appear abnormal in some way. There are lots of ways to approach outlier detection problems.
Recommender Systems
No matter what your business, you’re probably looking for ways to get more traffic and increase sales. If you have a lot of data on your customers, then recommender systems could be an effective tool in helping your company grow. This is because they help predict what a customer would like based on their preferences and past actions. By knowing what customers might like before they even come to your site, it becomes easier to match them with products that are most likely to convert into sales.