It's worth noting that the popular Coursera course "Machine Learning" taught by Andrew Ng uses Octave as its tool. This is mentioned in the Octave book's prefa

It's worth noting that the popular Coursera course "Machine Learning" taught by Andrew Ng uses Octave as its tool. This is mentioned in the Octave book's preface; see https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning if you're interested in the course itself. It is possible to use MATLAB instead, but there's often no real reason to do so. I think a lot of people have already decided to use Octave instead, because it solves their problems just fine.