Thursday, April 23, 2015

What language should be used for Machine Learning?

R vs. Python vs Matlab vs ....

Use anything you are comfortable with. The objective should not be to learn a language or learning machine learning in a standard language, but to understand the algorithm behind the solution.

There are a lot of tools (like Weka) which can run your models or packages in R or Python which take in the data and throws out the output, but make sure you understand the algorithm properly else you will not be able to tweak the model or improve its accuracy.

Open Source: R, Python, Octave
Paid: SAS, MATLAB

... plus a lot of other tools and platforms. Stick to one or two, and practice a lot.

If your aim is to go a level up, participate in Kaggle.com to know what type of problems are being solved by the top data scientists of the world. If you are just a business analyst who just ran some predictive models in R/SAS/SQL and analyzed some data, you will understand how much there is is still to learn !! 

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