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Yes, I believe you do need to have a good math understanding to understand why a model is behaving the way it is and develop intuition into where the problem might be but that comes with experience. If you're looking into ML research then absolutely you need to learn the math but if you intend to support ML as a programmer then there's plenty of space for you to do so

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Thanks for the response! I'm torn between AI research and just implementing models with my own data, I do enjoy math but I can't seem to understand advanced math, that might change after I get an engineering degree though, or not ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But for the time being, I'm just wondering if people who win Kaggle competitions implement their own algorithm, or do they just read a lot and try techniques that are already out there?

Good luck in your studies and plans!

I can't answer you about Kaggle competitions as I never was involved in any but I imagine the novelty would be in the way people encode the datasets and maybe the cost functions they implement but the models themselves are probably based on already established archs

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