Is there a way into machine learning without doing going and going an Ms or PhD?
Im working my way through a coursera course on it but I'm not sure that is enough. All the positions I see are looking for academic experience or 5+ years doing it. Neither of which are doable for me.
Chapters 1-7 are worth their weight in gold. This is one of the cases where the physical books are much better, as you'll need to flick back and forth to see the figures (which are one of the best parts).
The forgoing assumes that you already know some statistics/data analysis (the latter probably being more important).
If you haven't done this before, then I suggest that you acquire some data you care about, install R (a good book is the Art of R Programming by Matloff), and start trying to make inferences. And draw graphs. Many, many, many graphs.
If you keep at this, finding papers/books and reading theory, and implementing it in your spare time, then you can probably get a good data science job in 1-2 years. You'll probably need to devote much of your free time to it though.
I'm assuming that you can already code, given the context :)
I'm on that coursera course too! The course is pretty basic though. It'll help you get the concepts but there's too much spoon feeding in there to make you good enough to compete with people with MS and PhDs. Also that course doesn't cover deep learning and you should definitely study that.
I don't know how reproducible the approach is, but i'm working my way in from being a php developer previously. The company i work for is building a big data / machine learning platform from the ground up, and they bootstrapped the project from existing employees, including myself.
Is there a way into machine learning without doing going and going an Ms or PhD?
Im working my way through a coursera course on it but I'm not sure that is enough. All the positions I see are looking for academic experience or 5+ years doing it. Neither of which are doable for me.