A lot of people want to learn machine learning these days. But the daunting bottom-up curriculum that most ML teachers propose is enough discourage a lot of newcomers.
In this tutorial I flip the curriculum upside down and will outline what I think is the fastest and easiest way to get a solid grasp of ML.
Table of Contents
The curriculum I propose here is a looping multi-step step process that goes like this:
- Step 0: Immerse yourself in the Machine Learning field
- Step 1: Study one project that looks like your endgame
- Step 2: Learn the programming language
- Step 3: Learn the libraries from top to bottom
- Step 4: Do one project that you’re passionate about in max one month
- Step 5: Identify one gap in your knowledge and learn about it
- Step 6: Repeat steps 0 to 5
This is a looping learning plan because the 6th step is actually a GOTO to Step 0!
As a disclaimer, this curriculum might strange to you. But I’ve battle tested it when I was teaching machine learning to undergraduates at McGill University.
I tried many iteration of this curriculum, starting with the theoretically superior bottom-up approach. But from experience, this pragmatic top-down approach is what gives the best results.
One common critique I get is that people not starting with the basics, like statistics or linear algebra, will have a poor understanding of machine learning and they will not know what they are doing when modeling.
In theory, yes, this is true and this is why I started teaching ML with the bottom up approach. In practice, this has never been the case.
What actually ended up happening was that because the students knew how to do the high level modeling, they were much more inclined to delve into the low level stuff on their own as they saw the direct benefit it would bring to their higher level skills.
This context that they were able to set for themselves wouldn’t have been there if they’d started from the bottom – and this is where I believe most teachers lose their students.
All that being said, let’s jump into the actual learning plan! 🚀🚀🚀
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