<story><title>Ask HN: How to get started with machine learning?</title><text>How should a software engineer with no machine learning background get started on the subject?
Do you think that getting started by learning a framework like TensorFlow is a good idea or should I gain a background knowledge first?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>scottmcdot</author><text>Thanks. Can you recommend any statistics books to be safe?</text></item><item><author>nl</author><text>DON&amp;#x27;T LEARN NEURAL NETWORKS FIRST.&lt;p&gt;Instead, learn decision trees and more importantly enough statistics so you aren&amp;#x27;t dangerous.&lt;p&gt;Do you know what the central limit theorem is and why it is important? Can you do 5-fold cross validation on a random forest model in your choice of tool?&lt;p&gt;Fine, now you are ready to do deep learning stuff.&lt;p&gt;The reason I say not to do neural networks first is because they aren&amp;#x27;t very effective with small amounts of data. When you are starting out you want to be able to iterate quickly and learn, not wait for hours for a NN to train and then be unsure why it isn&amp;#x27;t working.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>master_yoda_1</author><text>&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www-bcf.usc.edu&amp;#x2F;~gareth&amp;#x2F;ISL&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www-bcf.usc.edu&amp;#x2F;~gareth&amp;#x2F;ISL&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt; is not an statistics book. its a statistical machine learning book.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;All of statistics&amp;quot; is really a great book if you have time work through he exercise.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: How to get started with machine learning?</title><text>How should a software engineer with no machine learning background get started on the subject?
Do you think that getting started by learning a framework like TensorFlow is a good idea or should I gain a background knowledge first?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>scottmcdot</author><text>Thanks. Can you recommend any statistics books to be safe?</text></item><item><author>nl</author><text>DON&amp;#x27;T LEARN NEURAL NETWORKS FIRST.&lt;p&gt;Instead, learn decision trees and more importantly enough statistics so you aren&amp;#x27;t dangerous.&lt;p&gt;Do you know what the central limit theorem is and why it is important? Can you do 5-fold cross validation on a random forest model in your choice of tool?&lt;p&gt;Fine, now you are ready to do deep learning stuff.&lt;p&gt;The reason I say not to do neural networks first is because they aren&amp;#x27;t very effective with small amounts of data. When you are starting out you want to be able to iterate quickly and learn, not wait for hours for a NN to train and then be unsure why it isn&amp;#x27;t working.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hnarayanan</author><text>I found this a really good book: &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www-bcf.usc.edu&amp;#x2F;~gareth&amp;#x2F;ISL&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www-bcf.usc.edu&amp;#x2F;~gareth&amp;#x2F;ISL&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>