From Data Analysis to Machine Learning

"In my last article, I stated that for practitioners (as opposed to theorists), the real prerequisite for machine learning is data analysis, not math. One of the main reasons for making this statement, is that data scientists spend an inordinate amount of time on data analysis. The traditional statement is that data scientists "spend 80% of their time on data preparation." While I think that this statement is essentially correct, a more precise statement is that you'll spend 80% of your time on getting data, cleaning data, aggregating data, reshaping data, and exploring data using exploratory data analysis and data visualization. And ultimately, the importance of data analysis applies not only to data science generally, but machine learning specifically. The fact is, if you want to build a machine learning model, you'll spend huge amounts of time just doing data analysis as a precursor to that process. Moreover, you'll use data analysis to explore the results of your model after ...