Which Machine Learning Algorithm Should I Use?

Hui Li is Principal Staff Scientist, Data Science at SAS. This resource is designed primarily for beginner to intermediate data scientists or analysts who are interested in identifying and applying machine learning algorithms to address the problems of their interest. A typical question asked by a beginner, when facing a wide variety of machine learning algorithms, is "which algorithm should I use?" Even an experienced data scientist cannot tell which algorithm will perform the best before trying different algorithms. We are not advocating a one and done approach, but we do hope to provide some guidance on which algorithms to try first depending on some clear factors.