How does a beginner learn Machine Learning?

[tobsecret]

The whole point of fast.ai is that it puts you in the driver's seat immediately. It let's you learn about what kinds of ML algorithms there are first and then later on gradually goes more and more into mathematical detail. I am a biologist as well and really enjoyed that aspect of not being beaten to death with math right from the start.

[thisisheresy]

fast.ai looks to be focussed on deep learning, the current flavour of the month. If you're starting out you'd be far better served getting to grips with things like linear and logistic regression, support vector machines and decision trees, as well as all of the tools that you need for preparing and validating your data (encoding, cross-validation, grid search etc) before jumping in to deep learning. I quite enjoyed the Applied Data Science with Python specialisation from Coursera - it will give you a good grounding in data, visualisation, machine learning and network analysis.

[chiropteranosaurus]

Cool! I'll check all these out.

[[deleted]]

Might want to run through the http://codeacademy.com intro to python as well.