It's easy until you have to start adjusting parameters, understand the results meaningfully, and tune the algorithms for actual "Bit Data". Try doing most stati

It's easy until you have to start adjusting parameters, understand the results meaningfully, and tune the algorithms for actual "Bit Data". Try doing most statistical analysis with dense matrices and watch your app go out of memory in two seconds. It's great that we can stand on the shoulders of giants, but having a certain understanding of what these algorithms are doing is critical for choosing them and the parameters in question. Also, K-means is relatively easy to understand untuitively. Try doing that with Latent Dirichlet Allocation, Pachinko Allocation, etc. Even Principal Component Analysis and Linear Least Squares have some nontrivial properties that need to be understood.