It was a bit since last post. Recently I have been not following a very structured approach to courses or training materials, but I have rather attempted to consolidate what I have learned along these years. My daily job continues to be very far apart from Data Science and indeed it is going also far apart from programming, I get to do it less and less. But that is what I like the most, so I am trying to do it as much as possible in my free time. It is now almost three years that I play with Data Science, MOOCs, R, Python.. Octave… etc. And if you do not exercise those skills daily, they will fade away. I found out that there are a couple of good ways to keep them alive and sharpen them. One of course, it is the interest. You have to keep that alive. The second is resources, that make you explore the same subjects from different perspectives, possibly hands-on. One of the greatest ones is this: The DataCamp.com Community web portal. In particular I like to follow Hugo Browne Anderson’s Facebook code-along series. For instance this or this.
Unfortunately I cannot do it live, but the good thing is that all Facebook code along events are on the community portal. And Hugo is a great host, I want to thank him because I have enjoyed every minute of all the time I spent watching the videos and coding along.
Another great resource is the free MOOC Introduction to Machine Learning on Udacity.com. This course is divided in 16 modules, and all of them have practice in the form of mini-projects (in Python, very suitable for Jupyter Notebook). These are great to familiarize with libraries such as scikit-learn for instance. I strongly recommend this to everyone, it is in my opinion complementary to courses like Prof. NG’s Machine Learning at coursera or others that are being taught around. In practice, with the Data Science specialization I was introduced to the subject and explored it in R, with Prof. Ng, we have gone deep down in the making of ML, (and explored it with Octave – in my opinion not the best choice – but useful) and with this one the concepts are explored at a higher level but there is practice at the every corner, which is always good. In my opinion this is really an inspirational course.
