Learning Machine Learning

A while back, I started the Deep Learning course provided by fast.ai and after going through the first few lessons, I felt like I needed to brush up on my Machine Learning skills first if I want to get a deeper understanding of Deep Learning. It wasn’t that they were going at an extra pace or were covering hard mathematical problems and complex algorithms, but they did require us to learn some material on our own, by reading articles or watching some videos or simulations, etc.

Anyways, I decided to put the fast.ai course on hold for a while and complete a few courses on Machine Learning first. It’s not that I didn’t have any Machine Learning experience before taking that course.

I’ve completed the Machine Learning Nanodegree offered by Udacity. It was an amazing experience as I learned a lot of new things and had some hands-on experience, with the problems we face in machine learning and the libraries, tools, and algorithms that are mostly used to solve those problems, by completing several projects. My Capstone Project was related to a Computer Vision problem, the famous dogs-vs-cats classification problem, and I solved it using CNN. So, I had a little bit of experience with Deep Learning as well.

Nonetheless, I still wanted to explore Machine Learning a bit further and get more comfortable with it. I had a few courses on my mind that were better suited for my situation and on top was the Machine Learning course taught by Andrew Ng. I had started this course half a year ago, but because of some forgettable reasons, I wasn’t able to complete it.

This was the perfect course for me as I had some experience with Machine Learning but I didn’t fully understand some of the algorithms and the techniques we used. This course provided just that, a little more detail as to why we do such and such and why and how this works. The teaching style of Andrew Ng was phenomenal, the way he could explain difficult concepts without dumbing them down.

You can’t imagine my surprise when I found out today that Andrew Ng released 5 new courses on Deep Learning, the Deep Learning Specialization.

Given the quality of the first Machine Learning course by Andrew Ng and the positive feedback it got, chances are that this specialization is going to be quite amazing as well.

This gave me extra motivation to complete the Machine Learning course first and then delve into this specialization to whet my appetite. By looking at the first two weeks, I am positive that this is going to be a very rewarding experience for me.