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machine-learningartificial-intelligence

Machine learning algorithms: which algorithm for which issue?


I am new at the domain of machine learning and i have noticed that there are a lot of algorithms/ set of algorithms that can be used: SVM, decision trees, naive bayes, perceptron etc... That is why I wonder which algorithm should one use for solving which issue? In other words which algorithm solves which problem class?

So my question is if you know a good web site or book that focuses on this algorithm selection problematic?

Any help would be appreciated. Thx in advance.

Horace


Solution

  • Take Andrew Ng's machine learning course on coursera. It's beautifully put together, explains the differences between different types of ML algorithm, gives advice on when to use each algorithm, and contains material useful for practioners as well as maths if you want it. I'm in the process of learning machine learning myself and this has been by far the most useful resource.

    (Another piece of advice you might find useful is to consider learning python. This is based on a mistake I made of not starting to learn python at an earlier stage and ruling out the many books, web pages, sdks, etc that are python based. As it turns out, python is pretty easy to pick up, and from my own personal observations at least, widely used in the machine learning and data science communities.)