About this course: This course will introduce the learner to applied machine learning, focusing more on the techniques and methods than on the statistics behind these methods. The course will start with a discussion of how machine learning is different than descriptive statistics, and introduce the scikit learn toolkit. The issue of dimensionality of data will be discussed, and the task of clustering data, as well as evaluating those clusters, will be tackled. Supervised approaches for creating predictive models will be described, and learners will be able to apply the scikit learn predictive modelling methods while understanding process issues related to data generalizability (e.g. cross validation, overfitting).

Who is this class for: This course is part of “Applied Data Science with Python“ and is intended for learners who have basic python or programming background, and want to apply statistics, machine learning, information visualization, social network analysis, and text analysis techniques to gain new insight into data. Only minimal statistics background is expected, and the first course contains a refresh of these basic concepts.