Comment by TechDebtDevin

1 month ago

Anyone who wants to demystify ML should read: The StatQuest Illustrated Guide to Machine Learning [0] By Josh Starmer.

To this day I haven't found a teacher who could express complex ideas as clearly and concisely as Starmer does. It's written in an almost children's book like format that is very easy to read and understand. He also just published a book on NN that is just as good. Highly recommend even if you are already an expert as it will give you great ways to teach and communicate complex ideas in ML.

[0]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/75622146-the-statquest-i...

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TechDebtDevin

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Lerc  1 month ago

I have followed a fair few StatQuest and other videos (treadmills with Youtube are great for fitness and learning in one)

I find that no single source seems to cover things in a way that I easily understand, but cumulatively they fill in the blanks of each other.

Serrano Academy has been a good source for me as well. https://www.youtube.com/@SerranoAcademy/videos

The best tutorials give you a clear sense that the teacher has a clear understanding of the underlying principles and how/why they are applied.

I have seen a fair few things that are effectively.

'To do X, you {math thing}' While also creating the impression that they don't understand why {math thing} is the right thing to do, just that {math thing} has a name and it produces the result. Meticulously explaining the minutiae of {math thing} substitutes for a understanding of what it is doing.

It really stood out to me when looking at UMAP and seeing a bunch of things where they got into the weeds in the math without explaining why these were the particular weeds to be looking in.

Then I found a talk by Leland McInnes that had the format.

{math thing} is a tool to do {objective}. It works, there is a proof, you don't need to understand it to use the tool but the info for that is over there if you want to tale a look. These are our objectives, let's use these tools to achieve them.

The tools are neither magical black boxes, nor confused with the actual goal. It really showed the power of fully understanding the topic.