My advice to you would be to start backwards. Find a few interesting-looking papers in the field and get a feel for the math involved and learn it. If you learn

My advice to you would be to start backwards. Find a few interesting-looking papers in the field and get a feel for the math involved and learn it. If you learn your mathematics as a tool to make sense of the papers you're reading, you're likely to be going down the right path for your goals. That said, linear algebra and statistics (+ prereqs) are an absolute necessity.