You Don’t Have To Be Guru At Math To Get Started In Machine Learning

Hi folks, one of the common misconceptions in the Machine Learning world is this idea that in order to learn data science and machine learning you have to be a math guru, but is math a prerequisite to learn machine learning? The short answer is no! And here i’ll explain you why

Math is not the primary prerequisite for machine learning

One of the most misguided thoughts is that you have to be master at math, know linear algebra, calculus, Differential equations, Mathematical statistics, Optimization, Algorithm analysis…, please don’t use this as an excuse to not learn Machine Learning.

This thought often comes from academia, as they are the ones writing the algorithms from scratch and definitely they had to go through the math, they had to know how to calculate derivatives and write Gradient Descent Algorithm from scratch but what I would like to tell you is that even if you’re not very comfortable with math you can still be very successful in this field.

Tools will do the math for you

There a lot of libraries that makes the task of applying a machine learning algorithm to solve a task very easy, take as an example the widely used Python’s scikit-learn library, with this in just one line of code you’ll have the most common algorithms just there for you and ready to be used. Abstracting the details of the implementation of the algorithms can be very helpful if you are just getting started in machine learning and you really want to get your hands dirty, I mean, lot of us most of the times learn more playing around with code and just get it working.

First get it done, them ask how you did it.

This can sound a stupid idea for many people but I can really guarantee you, this works very well, try it yourself, find a problem you’re interested about, pick an algorithm and use the tools at your disposal to solve the problem, see what results you get. Them ask what’s going on behind the curtain, what’s the algorithm really doing? How it is learning? You will be amazed with how much you will learn.

Math still plays a big role

Don’t get me wrong, you can learn a lot and do amazing things without knowing math but if your intention is to be part, follow or just keep up with research studies, them math might help you to understand the algorithms, the formulas, how the learning is done and do many things.

Math is not required to learn machine learning but it can help you to understand the concepts and implementations of many algorithms.

Last Thing!

If you enjoyed the writings leave your claps 👏 to recommend this article so that others can see it.