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Rebecca Vickery Follow

May 27 · 6 min read · Listen

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3 Free Machine Learning Courses You Should

Take Right Now
Get started with your machine learning journey for free

Photo by Avel Chuklanov on Unsplash

126 1
There are many ways to get started with studying machine learning. I have previously
written a lot about how to design your own curriculum and roadmap as an alternative
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to taking courses. This approach allows you to pick and choose free, or low-cost,
resources from across the internet that suit both your learning style and budget.

However, when you are just starting out on the beginning of your journey into machine
learning it can often be useful to follow at least a short course that will guide you
through the basic concepts first. This will give you a good foundational overview of the
field and it will make it easier to design your own learning path and then continue on
with deeper self-directed learning.

There are many machine learning courses available online. They range from short
courses to much longer MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), and they can vary
considerably in price.

I am an advocate for sharing free resources for learning and fortunately, there are
several free machine learning courses available. In this article, I am going to share my
three favourite free courses. They each have their own angle on machine and deep
learning and contain a variety of content types, from videos to practical coding
exercises, and it is, therefore, worth a beginner following all three.

If you are just getting started with studying machine learning I would recommend
getting started with the courses covered in this post. They are presented here in the
order I would recommend learning them in and I have also provided links to some
additional resources that will give you the prerequisite knowledge needed for the last
two courses.

1. Making friends with machine learning

From Cassie Kozyrkov

Introduction to ML and AI - MFML Part 1

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Length: 6.5 hours

Best suited for: Everyone

Core subject: Applied machine learning

Originally put together as an internal course at Google, this was released to the general
public via YouTube in 2021. This is both a highly entertaining big picture introduction
to applied machine learning and an exceptionally practical and beginner-friendly guide
— understandable by anyone.

Rather than focussing on the theory or implementation details for machine learning it
aims to give a high-level overview of the core concepts. This makes it digestible for
anyone looking to get an overview of machine learning, not just technical people.

By taking this course you will gain an understanding of the end to end machine
learning process, achieve an intuitive knowledge of the available algorithms including
how they should be used and take a tour of some real-world machine learning use
cases.

This is hands-down one of the best machine learning courses I have ever seen. It covers
an introduction to all concepts and also covers common pitfalls and gotchas when
applying machine learning in the real world. In my opinion, this course should be
mandatory viewing for anyone working in or thinking of working in the field of applied
machine learning!

If you are completely new to machine learning I would suggest starting with this
course for your very first introduction. There are no prerequisites such as knowing how
to code so it is an ideal place to get started. Once you have taken this course I
recommend developing at least basic Python programming skills before moving on to
the courses recommended in subsequent parts of this article. Codecademy is a great
place to get started with learning how to program.
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2. Machine learning crash course

From Google

Machine Learning Crash Course | Google Developers

Learn and apply fundamental machine learning concepts with the
Crash Course, get real-world experience with the…
developers.google.com

Length: 15 hours

Best suited for: Learners who can code with Python and already have a good
understanding of linear algebra and statistics.

Core subject: Practical machine learning

This relatively short course covers an extensive breadth of machine learning topics. It is
very hands-on, with much of the machine learning code focussed on TensorFlow APIs.

The course consists of 25 lessons each covering a specific area of machine learning.
The content consists of a mixture of video lectures, written guides and practical
exercises. The exercises are a combination of short tests to check your understanding of
the concepts and hands-on programming on the Collaboratory platform.

The course covers much of the theory behind machine learning as well as its practical
application. Topics covered include an introduction to TensorFlow, model training and
evaluation, algorithms, model optimisation, generalization and a deep dive into neural
networks. It also includes a series of case studies for machine learning and some useful
content around problem framing that is rarely seen in these types of courses.

This is the perfect course to take after you have grasped the high-level concepts behind
machine learning and have gained some Python programming experience. It is also
helpful to have some understanding of linear algebra and statistics so if you need to
brush up on these subjects check out some of the courses on khanacademy.org first.
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3. Practical deep learning for coders

From FastAI

Practical Deep Learning for Coders

If you're ready to dive in right now, here's how to get started. If you
want to know more about this course, read the…
course.fast.ai

Length: 7 weeks

Best suited for: Learners with at least one year's coding experience

Core subject: Deep learning

Deep learning is a subset of machine learning and taking a course that will dive deeper
into this field is a perfect follow-up to Google’s course described above. FastAI’s
“practical deep learning for coders” is a great introduction to deep learning and neural
networks in particular.

The creators of this course state that their aim is to “make deep learning accessible to as
many people as possible”. It is primarily designed for learners who already know how to
write Python code and focuses heavily on giving a practical introduction with guided
Jupyter Notebooks available, alongside a video for each section. You should therefore
take this course later in your learning journey once you have at least one year of
programming experience.

This course has a great structure that starts with a high-level introduction to deep
learning including the history, and then gently transitions into more complex topics.
You will learn about how to train deep learning models, how to optimise them and how
to put them into production.

More specialised areas of deep learning are also covered here with a lesson on
collaborative filtering and one on natural language processing (NLP).
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In this post, I have shared three free online courses for studying machine learning.
Each of the three courses covers varying aspects of the field at a relatively high level
acting as a perfect introduction.

If you are just getting started, following the material presented in this article will give
you solid foundational knowledge which you can then build on with a customised
learning pathway. To recap these courses should be taken as follows:

1. Making friends with machine learning — a gentle, entertaining introduction to

machine learning (no programming required)

2. Machine learning crash course — a detailed end to end machine learning course
which will teach you how to code machine learning models with Python

3. Practical deep learning for coders — a fantastic, practical introduction to deep

learning

Once you have taken these courses I would recommend taking a look at my posts,
linked earlier in this article that will guide you in designing a complete learning
pathway. There are many free, or very low-cost resources available online that will
build on your knowledge of data science and machine learning.

If you are interested in finding out more about resources that are available I have also
previously published a complete list of free materials that are widely available online.

How to Learn Data Science for Free

A complete learning path including resources that won’t cost you a
cent
towardsdatascience.com

Thanks for reading!

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