If yes, then what are the resources if someone is trying to learn Machine Learning all by himself/herself?<p>The Coursera class on Machine Learning taught by Andrew Ng should be a good starting point but will that be enough to land the job?<p>Most of the Job Description about the position of Machine Leaning/Data Scientist looks for someone who has done Phd/Masters in Computer Science/Statistics/Maths/Physics. Wondering which company will hire someone who is self taught.
Not to self advertise, but to use my own case to show that you can do some significant things if you're stubborn enough:<p>I'm self taught and under 3 years I'm collaborating with people at Stanford Research on an open source Question Answering System (<a href="https://github.com/SolrSherlock/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/SolrSherlock/</a>) . I've also implemented my own stack for all of NLP that I'm working on contributing (summarization, sentiment analysis, named entity recognition,...)<p>You don't have to have a PHD to do it. Here's a bit of my background:<p>Coursera NLP class (first one from Stanford, not the later one)<p>AI class in college (Dropped out in year 3 though..so no masters or anything crazy)<p>Machine Learning class from coursera<p>Implementing and understanding LOTS of papers in the field<p>So as you can see not much. Most of my understanding is self taught. There's enough free materials out there for you to gain a practical understanding of it. Just take the time to build up your fundamentals and work from there. I have a practical understanding of the mechanics involved and can implement the different optimization algorithms and the like as well as understand the implications of the data.
Most people looking for machine learning will be looking for the projects you have worked on.<p>You can approach learning from several perspectives. Learning machine learning from abstract theory is one thing, there is also learning it as part of an application - Coursera has a Recommender System course that just started and I would venture the guess that it's also about machine learning.
Companies are quite desperate to find data scientists, I am sure they will hire anyone who can do the job properly, self-taught or not :)
You may want to do more than one class before applying to jobs though - for instance check out stuff like Geoffrey Hinton's course on Neural Networks for Machine Learning <a href="https://www.coursera.org/course/neuralnets" rel="nofollow">https://www.coursera.org/course/neuralnets</a>, plus general CS & Stats classes if you don't have a CS or Maths degree.
Further question for myself, can it be self taught without a degree in comp sci/math?
I have a finance degree and knowledge of python/R, but I'm not sure if the concepts are attainable for me. I've had a few stats classes but only one calculus class. ML seems like a very interesting field.
I would hope so, since I am largely self-taught. :-)
Although it has taken me 10 years or so; and I have had the privilege of working with some fantastically knowledgeable mentors over that time period...