MLcourse.ai is an open Machine Learning course provided by OpenDataScience. It is intended for people who are starting with Machine Learning and Data Science. The course is specifically designed so that it finds a perfect balance between theory and practice. To do so, the authors of the course introduced a balanced combination of readings, articles, videos, assignments, and competitions. Let’s dive in and explore in detail what the course offers.
The first thing to be mentioned is that the course does not follow a specific timeline and students can alternate between learning resources in the way that they prefer. As we mentioned before, the resources are divided into articles, videos, assignments, and competitions.
Prerequisites
The mlcourse.ai is not an advanced Machine Learning course and therefore the only prerequisites are basic coding (Python) skills and basic knowledge of calculus, linear algebra, and statistics. The authors have prepared a Docker image with all the necessary software required to follow the course.
Content
Each article is bound to an assignment around which the whole course is built. The goal is to force students to use the provided resources in order to solve the assignments. The assignments are given as Jupyter notebooks where students have to fill specific parts with their code/solution.
The articles start with basic exploratory data analysis, then they cover basic concepts such as classification, regression all the way to time series and gradient boosting. There are exactly 10 article topics:
- Exploratory data analysis with Pandas
- Visualization
- Decision trees and Classification
- Logistic regression
- Ensembles and Random Forest
- Linear regression and regularization
- Unsupervised learning
- Stochastic Gradient Descent for classification and regression
- Time series analysis with Python
- Gradient boosting
Additionally, students can take part in several Kaggle In-class competitions held during the course. A Spring 2019 session has started on 11th of February (note that students can join at any point!) and there are two Spring 2019 assignments already published.
Bottom Line
In conclusion, mlcourse.ai is a good, free online resource for learning Machine Learning and Data Science. There is no certification scheme, the course is open for everyone and there is a slack community channel for the purpose of connecting with other students and course authors.