Math is essential for this field, anyone who tells you otherwise doesn't know what they are talking about. You can hack together something quick and dirty witho

Math is essential for this field, anyone who tells you otherwise doesn't know what they are talking about. You can hack together something quick and dirty without understanding the underlying math, and you certainly can use existing libraries and tools to do some basic stuff, but you won't get very far. Machine learning is easy only if you know your linear algebra, calculus, probability and stats, etc. I think this classic paper is a good way to test if you have the right math background to dive deeper into the field: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~blei/papers/BleiNgJordan2003.pdf http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~blei/papers/BleiNgJordan2003.pd...