Ask HN: Advice for acquiring machine learning techniques?

6 points·anxiously··4 comments

I am an engineer and I am familiar with some techniques and methods but feel they are likely ~8 years behind the current techniques.

How can I best learn more machine learning techniques, technology and apply it to my problem domains?

View on HN

Can you elaborate what you would do with machine learning techniques? In what capacity? I'd love to understand what problems you have.

Generally speaking, a great book to start with is this - https://www.amazon.com/Hands-Machine-Learning-Scikit-Learn-T...

Work in the field and solve problems. I've worked in the field for a short time, around six years, but with great variety: banking, transportation, energy, telecommunications, employment, health and well-being for seniors, security, traffic, public relations, commerce, retail and distribution, etc.

I've never been bored. I've never had a "same-different day". We eventually built a machine learning platform to ship faster.

In that case, consulting may be good for you.

Old techniques are just as good as the new ones :) If you have a specific problem you are trying to solve, I'd recommend just reading papers and looking up things you don't understand. Otherwise, if you're just looking for general knowledge, a class could be helpful.

Look at past Kaggle competitions with similar characteristics to your problem; many (most?) competitions have threads in the discussion by top ranked participants detailing their approach.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com