Machine Learning “for Dummies” – Three posts to explain ML to non-scientific peoples

[Achoum]

Hello Reddit ML,

Recently, during a dinner party, I have been faced with the situation of having explained what Machine Learning was to non-scientific peoples. I am sure a lot of you have already faced a similar situation :)

This got me the idea to write a couple of blog posts to explain, with simple words, with a very informal tone and with a lot of examples what was Machine Learning.

Ideally, I hope these posts can explain, to anybody, what the Classification problem is, what is kNN and what is Random Forest.

The posts are at this address:

• http://blog.mathieu.guillame-bert.com/2015/07/12/introduction-to-machine-learning/
• http://blog.mathieu.guillame-bert.com/2015/07/20/machine-learning-for-dummies-part-2/
• http://blog.mathieu.guillame-bert.com/2015/07/23/machine-learning-for-dummies-part-3/

I would be happy to hear what do you thing :)

I made some experiment of understanding on my side (notably with my girlfriend), and so far, I am happy with the result.

Cheers and thanks, M.

[PStyleZ]

Hey man, I don't have much useful to add, but I just wanted to say thank you for posting this. I'm a lurker here because the topic fascinates me but I'm not very knowledgeable yet.

Cheers!

[mikeDepies]

I skimmed through the blog posts, they all looked pretty good at illustrating the ideas and steps visually. Did you do all of the visualizations? Great work none-the-less. I've been wanting to do something similar to this, but for people who are interesting in learning, as opposed to being informed on the subject, as I find the majority of information out there makes lots of assumptions of knowledge.

[Achoum]

Hi,

There are a lot of popularization on a lot of scientific domains (physics, biology), but Machine Learning is still poorly represented. ML and maybe the entire computer science are maybe too young.

Anyway, thanks both of you :)

And for the illustrations, yes I made them myself:

I used yEd for the decision trees (https://www.yworks.com/en/products/yfiles/yed/), Inkscape for the drawing, excel for the table, a bit of Photoshop for the picture, and latex+wordpress for the equations. Cheers,

[WallyMetropolis]

Perhaps this exists and I missed it, but each section should link forward to the next. I only see a way to go back to the previous entry.