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3 Free Courses that Helped Me Land My First

Data Scientist Job in Amazon
Farzad Mahmoodinobar · Follow
4 min read · Oct 6, 2022

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 genie in the bottle, by DALL.E 2

What courses do you recommend for me to start learning about Data Science and Machine
Learning?

I get asked this question on a monthly basis, if not weekly. So I decided to put together
this brief post to help address it. I will introduce three resources, provide an overview
of each and then will include a link to their respective websites.
Not long ago, I went to a Data Scientist friend of mine with the same question and
guided me to these three resources. Now I am going to pass the baton on to you and I
hope you do the same in the future, if you find them helpful. They helped me land my
first Data Science job in Amazon and I hope they can also help you get the role that you
want.

There is also an added benefit — All three are either free to enroll or course materials
are free to use.

I wanted to keep this post focused on these three resources so I did not go into
breaking down what technical knowledge is required for a Data Scientist in Amazon,
but if you are looking for that, feel free to check my other post linked here, which also
includes practice questions (with Jupyter notebooks) to practice what you learn.

Lastly, I recommend going through these three resources in the order that I have listed
them here, since they progressively increase in depth.

Let’s get started!

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1. Andrew Ng’s Machine Learning Course

I know what you are thinking. Everyone knows this one! With around 2.4 million views
as of October 2022, I am sure most of us know this one but it is still one of the best
courses for anyone to start learning about Machine Learning and includes practice
quizzes to test one’s learning.
1.1. Syllabus
Andrew Ng, who really does not need an introduction, focuses on what matters most
for those getting started with Machine Learning and breaks down the course into the
following:

1. Introduction to Machine Learning

2. Regression with Multiple Input Variables

3. Classification

Pro Tip: When I took this course a few years ago, practice problems did not have
solutions in Python, which was and remains my code of choice. Things might have
changed by now but if that is still the case and you also happen to prefer Python, a
simple Google search will help you find the solutions in Python.

1.2. Link to the Course

Free enrollment is available on Coursera.

2. John Paisley’s Machine Learning Course

John Paisley is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at
Columbia University. He is also an affiliated member of the Data Science Institute at
Columbia.

This one goes deeper than Andrew Ng’s course and explains more about the distinction
between probabilistic and non-probabilistic modeling and also supervised versus
unsupervised learning.

Pro Tip: This one is great for understanding the concepts but can sometimes go deep
into the mathematical side of things. If you follow the math, that is great but if you do
not (like me), focus more on the conceptual parts and you can safely skip the math-
heavy portions.

Let’s look at the syllabus for details.

2.1. Syllabus
Maximum likelihood estimation, linear regression, least squares
 Ridge regression, bias-variance, Bayes rule, maximum a posteriori inference

Bayesian linear regression, sparsity, subset selection for linear regression

Nearest neighbor classification, Bayes classifiers, linear classifiers, perceptron

Logistic regression, Laplace approximation, kernel methods, Gaussian processes

Maximum margin, support vector machines, trees, random forests, boosting

Clustering, k-means, Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm, missing data

Mixtures of Gaussians, matrix factorization

Non-negative matrix factorization, latent factor models, Principal Component

Analysis (PCA) and variations

Markov models, hidden Markov models

Continuous state-space models, association analysis

Model selection

2.2. Link to the Course

Course materials are available for free on edX.

3. Andreas Muller’s Applied Machine Learning

Andreas Muller is an Associate Research Scientist in Data Science Institute at
Columbia.

His course materials are available online and he also goes deeper into some Natural
Language Processing (NLP) topics (i.e. textual data) such as topic modeling,
embeddings, etc. So if you are interested in learning more about NLP, you will enjoy
those topics here.

Let’s look at the syllabus for details.

3.1. Syllabus
 Matplotlib and Visualization

Supervised learning

Preprocessing
Open in app
Linear models for regression

Searchfor
Linear models Medium
classification

Trees, forests and ensembles

Gradient descent and gradient boosting

Model evaluation

Calibration and imbalanced data

Parameter tuning and automatic machine learning

Dimensionality reduction

Clustering and mixture models

Working with text data

Topic models for text data

Word and document embeddings

Neural networks

Keras and convolutional neural networks

Time series

3.2. Link to the Course

Pro Tip: Make sure to check out his YouTube videos, as well as the course materials,
which are both available on the course website.
Thanks for Reading!
If you found this post helpful, please follow me on Medium and subscribe to receive
my latest posts!

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