Data Science & Machine Learning - 0 Introduction

Hi friends,

Data Science and Machine Learning are two hot topics at current scenario in IT industry but knowing where to start learning about the same is an overwhelming task as there are not many properly organized contents out there on the Internet to learn about the same. So, I decided to start this introductory course (you may call) on Data Science and Machine Learning to help students learn about Data Science and Machine Learning from scratch. I would also like to point out that I am no expert in the field and is also learning just like all of you. I will be using Python as the programming language for the programming instructions.

Before starting, I would like to give a brief summary about myself. I am Krishna Chaurasia. I have completed my Masters in Technology in Computer Science & Engineering from IIT Kharagpur recently in 2017. I have got placed on campus in Works Applications. Before that, I completed my B.Tech. in Computer Engineering from IIITD&M Kancheepuram in 2015.

So, let’s begin the course now. In this post, we’ll just see the course overview i.e. the things which we are going to learn through this course.  In the first half, we’ll learn about the popular data science libraries available in Python such as:

• NumPy
• SciPy
• Pandas
• Matplotlib
• Seaborn
• Plotly
• SciKit-Learn

Before learning about these libraries, we will first discuss basics of Python programming language so that we get refreshed with Python syntax and also make it easier for newbies in Python. Then, we’ll learn about NumPy. NumPy is a scientific computing library that allows us to work with NumPy Arrays. We then proceed to learn about an excellent data analysis library, Pandas, that allows us to read data from various sources such as csv, xlsx, sql and so on and perform Data Science tasks. We’ll go through the real world data sets to learn about these libraries through practical examples. We’ll then discuss the Data Visualization aspect of Data Science using Matplotlib and Seaborn libraries. In the later half of the tutorials, we'll learn about SciKit-Learn library in Python to implement machine learning algorithms. In the next post, we'll go about the installation process of Python and Jupyter Notebook.