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I like the curation of free educational content in a specific area because it eliminates the guesswork, and duplicated effort, of filtering for high-quality res
by Denzel 12y ago
I like the curation of free educational content in a specific area because it eliminates the guesswork, and duplicated effort, of filtering for high-quality resources. Thanks to Claudia Gold for the amazing amount of work she put into this. My main gripe comes with the majority of these data science courses/tracks.
It appears that no comprehensive treatment of applied data science exists. For the past few months, I've been searching high-and-low. I understand collaborative filtering; I've heard about the Netflix recommendation challenge ad nauseam; I grasp machine learning, bayesian statistics (prior, posterior, conjugate prior distributions, etc.) on a superficial level. Conversationally, I can hold my own with practitioners', albeit on a beginner level.
But what I, and others, want to learn is how to apply these techniques in a scalable way on a real production system. Right now, it's easy to conjecture about what could/should be done, but there's a lack of confidence in how to achieve the goals. I'm experimenting with a collaborative filtering problem using Cassandra as the data store for thumbs up/down ratings on products, and Hadoop for the MR pipeline; it'd be great to have more visible examples available. Is there any place I could find detailed information on real, online machine learning/statistical inference systems?
- bcbrown 12y agoI would suggest attending talks and meetups, where companies sometimes discuss their architecture.
- Claud334 12y agoThanks for your comments! I completely agree about the lack of hands-on courses. I found the same thing when I was putting this together. The capstone project is our attempt at including something more practical, but it's self-directed, so that's not exactly what you are after. (Creating individual courses was outside the scope of this project.) However, I'm confident it will exist someday, given the current popularity of both data science and online courses. I assume you've also done some Kaggle challenges? I agree with the suggestion that you should attend meetups and tech talks (or watch them online if there are none in your area). You'll hear more about real life examples and have a chance to ask questions. The other main way to learn what you're asking is to get a job doing it! You have more than enough background (assuming you also have knowledge of tools) and you will learn more from others and as you need the information.
- Denzel 12y agoYou know, I haven't had time to try any Kaggle challenges yet. I'll have to sit down and attempt one this weekend. I appreciate the advice, from both you and Brenden, I'm going to look for more data science meetups and keep my ear to the grapevine for any exciting positions. Keep up the great work Claudia.