Search for questions, people, and topics Ask New Question Sign In

Mathematics and Machine Learning Research Machine Learning Studying Related Questions

What are the mathematical pre-requisites for How do I learn mathematics for machine learning?
studying machine learning? How critical is mathematics for machine learning
scientist?
Ad by General Assembly Singapore
Is learning mathematical proofs necessary for
Skill up in data science with a part-time course at GA Singapore. machine learning?
Learn to build robust predictive models, test their validity, and communicate
What are the pre-requisites to learn Machine
results. Apply now! Learning?

Apply now at generalassemb.ly What are the pre requisites for NLP?

How much maths do you use in your machine

26 Answers
learning work?

Anoop Deoras, Does ML research in recommender system and NLP space Is Machine Learning easier than Mathematics?
Answered Feb 20, 2016
How is discrete mathematics used in machine
Instead of asking just WHAT, I think it is also important to know WHY. learning?

WHAT: Linear Algebra WHY: most of the machine learning that we do, deals What do students study in Machine Learning?

with scalars and vectors and matrices -- vectors of features, matrices of Is Machine Learning a pre-requisite for the Data
weights etc. You do vector matrix multiplication like say in logistic regression, Mining course taught on Coursera?

neural networks... Or you do matrix transpose first and then multiplication (for  Ask New Question
say in error back propagation in neural networks). Sometimes you need to do
clustering of input, maybe using spectral clustering techniques, which requires
you to know what eigen values are, eigen vectors are.. Sometimes you need to
take inverses of matrices, say in computing inverse of covariance matrix for
fitting a Gaussian distribution. So you now know WHY you need Linear Algebra.

WHAT: Optimization Theory WHY: How do you train the weights of your
model so that the training error is minimized ? Answer: optimization. You may
need to know how to take derivatives of loss function with respect to some
parameter so that you can carry out gradient descent optimization. You may
need to know what gradients mean. What are hessians if you are doing second
order optimization like LBFGS. You may need to learn what Newton steps are,
maybe to solve line searches. You will need to understand functional
derivatives to better understand Gradient Boosted Decision Trees. You will need
to understand convergence properties of various optimization methods to get
an idea of how fast or slow your algorithm will run.

WHAT: Probability and Statistics WHY: When you are doing machine
learning, you are primarily after some kind of distribution. What is the
probability of an output given my input ? Why do I need this ? When your
machine learning model predicts (assigns probabilities) high enough to known
observation, you know you have a good model at hand. Its a goodness criteria.
Statistics help you to count well, normalize well, obtain distributions, find
out the mean of your input feature, its standard deviation. Why do you need
these things ? You need means and variances to better normalize your input
data before you feed it into you machine learning system. This helps in faster
convergence (optimization theory concept).

WHAT: Signal Processing WHY: You usually do not feed raw input to your
machine learning systems. You do some kind of pre processing. For instance
you would like to extract some features from the input speech signal, or an
image. Now, extracting these features needs you to know properties of these
underlying signals. Digital signal processing or Image processing will help you
gain expertise. You would be in a better situation to know what feature
extraction works and what does not. You would want to learn what is a Fourier
transform because maybe you would like to apply that to speech signal or
maybe apply discrete cosine transform to images before using them as
features to your machine learning system.

You may want to also read this as an answer to the question: "How do I learn
Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing"
18.3k Views · View Upvoters

Your feedback is private.

Is this answer still relevant and up to date? Yes No

Promoted by DigitalOcean
Deploy your Python project - free $100/60-day credit.
Rapidly provision thousands of cloud servers in seconds with firewalls,
monitoring and alerts included.

Learn more at try.digitalocean.com

Related Questions More Answers Below

How do I learn mathematics for machine learning?

How critical is mathematics for machine learning scientist?

Is learning mathematical proofs necessary for machine learning?

What are the pre-requisites to learn Machine Learning?

What are the pre requisites for NLP?

 Ask
A New Question

Abhishek Roy, works at Tata Consultancy Services (2006-present)

Answered Mar 14, 2018

Like every other beginner who starts with Machine Learning, the first question
that would come to one’s mind is, “What are the prerequisites”? Well, let me
try to answer it to you based on my own experience. First the question you had
asked about Mathematics.

Having left mathematics during the First year of my BTech and Statistics even
prior to that, I was pretty skeptical when I decided to try out my hands on
machine learning. First thing I did was look around the web searching for
answers from folks who had followed a similar path as well as look into
prerequisites that the various courses had stated down.

The most important thing to know if you want to succeed as a Machine

Learning engineer is how to deal with data. Data Analysis is the most
important thing that you need to master in order to proceed with Machine
learning. Although it may sound surprising, unless you are able to analyse the
data correctly, you cannot build a model to use on the data. Now Data Analysis
is a pretty big field in itself and to work on Data Analysis you will need the
following skills:

1. Descriptive Statistics

2. Inferential Statistics

3. Linear Algebra

4. Probability Theory and a bit of Calculus.

Now before you get scared by seeing the list of prerequisites above, let me clarify
that you will mostly need to know the overall high level concepts. The
implementations in most cases are already done using some pre-defined
libraries of the programming languages that you will be using. However, you
need to understand and differentiate between the various concepts and
measurements and when to use each of them. A refresher course on each of
these topics can help thoroughly.

Online providers like Udacity provides such refresher courses as part of they
Machine learning programs to ensure that you are up to the mark where you
can start following the actual Machine Learning algorithms and projects. These
refresher courses are byte sized courses designed to help you understand the
concepts without deep delving in them and get you ready to understand and
make a decision on which concept to use based on the actual scenarios (i.e.
Data).

You can start off with the Intro To Machine Learning Program which is a free
course offered by Udacity to get your basic concepts cleared.

Once you complete the same, you can refer to their Pre-Requisite sections for
more details in their Machine Learning Nano Degree Program which actually
makes you work on 6 different real life projects.

Check out the links and you will be up and running with Machine Learning in
no time. It really worked for me.

Note: Apart from Mathematical Pre-requisites, there are a couple of other

things that you need to know.

1. Intermediate knowledge of a Programming language like R or

Python (which I always refer as the Swiss knife of programming
languages)

2. Understanding of basic algorithms and their implementations

using the programming language or libraries.

If you are just starting your path in programming and have very little or no
programming experience on Python or other languages, feel free to check out
the Intro To Computer Science program as well. It should help you in getting
the basic concepts clarified as well as give you a solid foundation in
programming to start with.
1.7k Views · View Upvoters

Promoted by Luminati.io
Luminati enables businesses to scrape data from the web.
Proxy network for businesses. Scrape using our 30M residential IPs without
getting blocked or misled.

Learn more at luminati.io

Ankit, Machine Learning & Deep Learning Expert

Answered Sep 23, 2017
Machine Learning Need

1. Programming [Java or Python ]

2. Maths

a. Probability

b. Calculus

c. Statistics

d. Linear Algebra

That’s Enough to Machine Learning . Just Go Through above Pre requisites .

If you Want to Learn Machine Learning , i will Suggest you

Best Machine Learning Online Courses

Machine Learning A-Z™: Hands-On Python & R In Data Science

Here you can Learn

Part 1 - Data Preprocessing

Part 2 - Regression: Simple Linear Regression, Multiple Linear

Regression, Polynomial Regression, SVR, Decision Tree Regression,
Random Forest Regression

Part 3 - Classification: Logistic Regression, K-NN, SVM, Kernel SVM,

Naive Bayes, Decision Tree Classification, Random Forest Classification

Part 4 - Clustering: K-Means, Hierarchical Clustering

Part 5 - Association Rule Learning: Apriori, Eclat

Part 6 - Reinforcement Learning: Upper Confidence Bound, Thompson

Sampling

Part 7 - Natural Language Processing: Bag-of-words model and

algorithms for NLP

Part 8 - Deep Learning: Artificial Neural Networks, Convolutional

Neural Networks

Part 9 - Dimensionality Reduction: PCA, LDA, Kernel PCA

Part 10 - Model Selection & Boosting: k-fold Cross Validation,

Parameter Tuning, Grid Search, XGBoost
Moreover, the course is packed with practical exercises which are based on live
examples. So not only will you learn the theory, but you will also get some
hands-on practice building your own models.

All The Best .

2k Views · View Upvoters

Edward Dixon, Data Scientist at Intel

Answered Jan 4, 2018

There really aren't many! If you just want to train effective models; a little linear
algebra (high school level) is necessary and some basic intuitions of calculus are
moderately helpful (most people never actually calculate the derivative of
anything, the idea is just to be able to read about new work and get a sense of
how it might help you).

I've seen interns come straight to the office from high school and do well with
just this background. The programming end of things is more likely to be a
limiting factor.

The biggest determinants of your success will likely be your willingness to 1) do

the dirty work of getting datasets into shape and 2) Iterate rapidly through
different solutions with ruthless empiricism.

Good luck!
7.6k Views · View Upvoters

Kotti Sasikanth, works at Tata Consultancy Services

Answered Mar 16, 2018

The basic mathematical pre-requisites for studying machine learning are

Linear algebra :- This is a branch of mathematics that involves equations. This

will help with obtaining intuition on how different variables are influencing the
value that need to be predicted in machine learning.

2.Calculus :- This is a field of mathematics where continuous change is studied.

This helps with understanding gradients and how to optimize different machine
learning algorithms.

3.Probability theory :- This is a field of study of probability. This is needed to

understand machine learning algorithms where different variables are not
deterministic.

4.Optimization methods :- This fields involves with studying various techniques

and method of optimization. This is highly useful in machine learning to obtain
different parameters. We tend to see and study about optimization methods
more in the context of deep learning.

5.Statistics :-This is a branch of mathematics dealing with the collection,

analysis, interpretation, presentation, and organization of data. Basically this
forms the basis of different machine learning algorithms and their
evolution.This involves both Inferential Statistics and Descriptive Statistics .

In addition to the mathematical pre-requisites, being proficient at programming

in Python/R, understanding different visualisation techniques etc..will be an
added advantage.

Learning and being proficient as suggested above helps understand the field in a
more intuitive way and thus help apply these techniques to solve wide variety of
problems.
599 Views · View Upvoters

Tom Seward, Machine Learning & NLP

Answered Feb 18, 2015 · Upvoted by Yuval Feinstein, Algorithmic Software Engineer in
NLP,IR and Machine Learning
Originally Answered: How well do I need to know the prerequisites to understand machine learning
methods?

Short answer - the more math you have under your belt, the better.

Longer answer:

It really depends on your end goal. Do you want to do ML research and develop
new algorithms? If so, all of those courses are prerequisites as you'll be doing a
ton of proofs.

If your goal is to work as a machine learning engineer, then more applied math
will be beneficial. This type of role will focus heavily on linear algebra,
multivariable calculus, and probability theory, so those are a must.

If you just want to analyze data and work as a business analyst, then college
algebra and basic statistics should be sufficient. You'll be working with a lot of
black box algorithms in SAS, SPSS, Stata, so they'll do a lot of the mathematical
work for you. Where you'll struggle a bit is knowing how to fix these algorithms
when they break down, fitting proper curves to your data, or engineering new
features.

My recommendation if you want to learn ML, is to start by watching some

online courses. Coursera has an excellent course by Andrew Ng. Udacity is also
starting to produce ML courses. If you find that you can keep up with the
content, then great. If you struggle through parts of it, then take your time and
learn the background you need.
5.9k Views · View Upvoters

Related Questions

How much maths do you use in your machine learning work?

Is Machine Learning easier than Mathematics?

How is discrete mathematics used in machine learning?

What do students study in Machine Learning?

Is Machine Learning a pre-requisite for the Data Mining course taught on Coursera?

Is machine learning worth studying?

Are mathematics and machine learning related?

What are the pre-requisites for scikit-learn?

How adept in mathematics should one be to consider/apply for a PhD in machine learning?

What parts of mathematics do I need to study before beginning to learn machine learning in
professional level?

 Ask
A New Question

Sitemap: # A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

About · Careers · Privacy · Terms · Contact