One of the principal responsibilities of a data scientist is to make reliable predictions based on data. When the amount of data available is enormous, it helps if some of the analysis can be automated. Machine learning is a way of identifying patterns in data and using them to automatically make predictions or decisions. In this data science course, you will learn basic concepts and elements of machine learning. The two main methods of machine learning you will focus on are regression and classification.

Every once in a while, there appears a paper that is so good, so well-written and so packed with insights, that I would read it a few times… that I wished I had written it myself. That happened when I read this perspective paper by Jonathan Chen and Steven Asch. Normally I'd tweet a link to it, or may be even add a figure from it (if I expect people to learn from it without them having to spend time), and there ends the matter. Sometimes I might add few more tweets, if I couldn't pack it all in a single tweet. But this piece is so good, the two pages are well worth a read.