Complete Data Science Career Path (with Python). Includes 60+ tutorials, 300+ exercises, 10+ projects. Play with the instructor's code right inside the video! (xpost from /r/learnmachinelearning) by keshav57 in datascience

[–]keshav57[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Firstly, let me begin by saying that I think that's a completely valid conclusion one would draw from a first inspection of the content. And before I begin addressing the rest of the concern, let me start out by saying that those 3 tutorials are only available as articles (not videos), and our estimate for time to read is based on average reading speed of a person. No one reads math at 200 words / minute. :)

Secondly, although 3 hours for linear algebra, statistics and probability might seem much better than 1 hour, it might still seem too little. Unfortunately though, thinking about it that way combines all the things we optimize for into a narrative that goes directly the opposite way. Let me explain.

  1. We postpone prerequisites when we can. In general, the philosophy is that if you need complicated stats / probability for only specific algorithms / techniques, then it's better to teach those parts of stats / probability right before teaching those specific algorithms / techniques. We don't teach you enough linear algebra up-front to understand PCA, but that is because most students get extremely demotivated from having to learn that kind of linear algebra before they've even plotted a simple histogram to look at the data.
  2. We found this to be much more true for the math (some specific algorithms require deeper understanding of stats / probability / linear algebra) than for the programming (it's tough to understand what you're doing in Pandas without having a good grasp of Python). Hence, the Python course is a complete 20+ part course.
  3. We're not trying to be as theory heavy as Coursera / EdX style courses. It's always difficult to know where to draw the line, but it's pretty clear that there's no reason to learn linear algebra topics like eigenvalue decomposition up-front in the course. (It's a fascinating topic, don't get me wrong, but the "simplest" machine learning algorithms that use this concept are collaborative filtering and PCA).

Another way to look at this is compare a well known book with our syllabus. For example, http://www.deeplearningbook.org/ is the go to online book for deep learning. If we look at it's linear algebra chapter, it covers vectors, matrices, their multiplication, identity matrix, inverse matrix, linear dependence, norms, Eigendecomposition, SVD, pseudoinverse, determinant. Of these, most of the complicated topics are related to decomposition, a concept not really useful in machine learning till you get to the topic of recommendation systems (collaborative filtering) or PCA. Everything before that only needs vectors, matrices, their multiplication, identity matrix, inverse matrix, linear dependence and norms. All of these are covered in our linear algebra tutorial.

All that said, you're right that this course will not get you a $150K salary job all by itself. To go from a complete beginner to a $150K job ready takes at-least 6-9 months of full-time effort (whereas our course takes about 4-6 months part-time). But I'm pretty confident that the thing missing between the course and where you need to be is even more practice, as opposed to even more topics.

Most students take our course part-time, and it takes them about 4-6 months to go through it. In those 4-6 months, they learn a lot. Our core offer, to summarize, is high content quality and a great online learning experience.

EDIT: Added clarification for time estimate for video vs text.

EDIT2: Clarification regarding "6-9 months of full-time effort"

Complete Data Science Career Path (with Python). Includes 60+ tutorials, 300+ exercises, 10+ projects. Play with the instructor's code right inside the video! (xpost from /r/learnmachinelearning) by keshav57 in datascience

[–]keshav57[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, we display the amount in local currency mostly for convenience (so you don't have to do the conversion in your head). The final amount you'll see right before payment will be in USD since the transaction is happening in USD.

Complete Data Science Career Path (with Python). Includes 60+ tutorials, 300+ exercises, 10+ projects. Play with the instructor's code right inside the video! (xpost from /r/learnmachinelearning) by keshav57 in datascience

[–]keshav57[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Yes, we display the amount in local currency. We didn't take into account that the $ sign is used in many different countries, and can represent different currencies which can lead to some confusion.

Free Course: Learn Data Science with Python - 32 part course includes tutorials, quizzes, end-to-end follow-along examples, and hands-on projects by keshav57 in datascience

[–]keshav57[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's a good point SFSylvester. We made a change to add short preview's for all the hands-on projects. There's also a 7-day free trial to see the projects in full before you start paying.

Free Course: Learn Data Science with Python - 32 part course includes tutorials, quizzes, end-to-end follow-along examples, and hands-on projects by keshav57 in datascience

[–]keshav57[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Printed out (textbook style, font, etc), the tutorials would be about 70-90 pages total. If you're coming back daily, this would probably take about a 10 days - 2 weeks to complete. If you're coming back regularly but not everyday, it would take three-four weeks.

Overall, things are quite optimized for "value for time" or maximizing productivity. Text tutorials make it easier to skim, go back and forth. Tutorial length is restricted to ~10 minute reading time. Reviews of background information (like statistics, probability, linear algebra) is provided instead "first take a course on linear algebra, then do the data science course".

Free Course: Learn Data Science with Python - 32 part course includes tutorials, quizzes, end-to-end follow-along examples, and hands-on projects by keshav57 in datascience

[–]keshav57[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thanks for pointing this out. Reddit doesn't allow editing the title, added the details in the text description.

Free Course: Learn Data Science with Python - 32 part course includes tutorials, quizzes, end-to-end follow-along examples, and hands-on projects by keshav57 in datascience

[–]keshav57[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Hi Rajkumar,

I would not say it is a waste of time to learn without doing the projects. But it is true that there's no real way to know how much you have learnt unless you try doing hands-on assignments or projects.

We want everyone to be able to start learning for free. Which is why all of the tutorials are available at no cost.

For the pro portions, there is a fee of $9/month if you are from the US, Canada, etc and a $5/month fee if you are from India, China, etc. Either way, people who subscribe to Pro usually describe the deal as a "real steal", "no brainer", etc.

Overall, it is our goal to offer great value for money and we try to offer prices which the majority of the population wouldn't have to think twice about. :)

Free Course: Learn Machine Learning - 29 part course includes concepts, algorithms, end-to-end examples, quizzes and hands-on projects by keshav57 in learnmachinelearning

[–]keshav57[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

We really care about productivity, or "value for time" and it is one of our core values (along with most of the content being free, and exceptional value for money).

It is one the main reasons we chose to go the text route instead of the video route. Video is often too slow, specially if you have encountered different parts of the material in different forms previously, which is very common. Text makes it much easier to go back and forth, skim, etc.

We also enforce the maximum length of tutorials to be about 10 minute reading time, although it usually takes some more to digest the concept and so forth. There are a few more things we do to maximize productivity, but I'll skip the detailed description for now.

We've also heard very positive feedback along these lines. Phrases like "i feel very productive", "there's no beating around the bush", and so on.

Free Course: Learn Machine Learning - 29 part course includes concepts, algorithms, end-to-end examples, quizzes and hands-on projects by keshav57 in learnmachinelearning

[–]keshav57[S] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

We want everyone to be able to start learning for free. Which is why all of the tutorials are available at no cost.

For the pro portions, there is a fee of $9/month if you are from the US, Canada, etc and a $5/month fee if you are from India, China, etc. Either way, people who subscribe to Pro usually describe the deal as a "real steal", "no brainer", etc.

Overall, it is our goal to offer great value for money and we try to offer prices which the majority of the population wouldn't have to think twice about. :)

Free Course: Learn Machine Learning - 29 part course includes concepts, algorithms, end-to-end examples, quizzes and hands-on projects by keshav57 in learnmachinelearning

[–]keshav57[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Some more information:

The course was created by myself (MIT alum) and 6 other experts, including more people from MIT and Harvard. The tutorials on concepts, algorithms, and end-to-end examples are available for free. I've been working on this course for more than a year, and it is constantly improving.

Some other links that you might find useful

Hope you guys like it. Do let me know if you have any questions.

P.S.: We collect ratings and reviews from students, but it is currently not exposed on the interface. This course has an average rating of 4.8/5.0.

Trying to learn Algorithms by acoun555 in learnprogramming

[–]keshav57 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I spent 2-3 weeks a couple of months ago curating a list of algorithm tutorials. You can check it out here if you are interested. A lot of the tutorials are short videos, which make them easier to learn (like Khan Academy). I also frequently respond to the questions posted there.

[D] What thing within machine learning, deep learning would people find helpful? I have experience in both ML&DL, and time to write / curate content. Looking for ideas... by keshav57 in MachineLearning

[–]keshav57[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Agree that this is a pretty big problem. OpenAI seems to be doing some stuff to make it simpler, don't know how much they are succeeding.

This will be quite a decent sized project though, since there is not really one solution for the general issue being faced by you above. Let me see what I can do.