IMH (and biased) O, a lot of great coders are implimentors, or let's say applied computers scientists.
That is great for building incredible open source software and a lot of other things that I would not be able to do given a 1000 years. However (again IMHBO) a specific ML and any other specific application of stastistics or mathematics becomes really tricky once your use case is explicitly defined.
You then need intimate and deep knowledge of the tools that you are using (e.g.: Should I even use NN? Should I even use genetic algorithms? Should I even use x?) but ML for most people is shorthand for NN and its variants or maybe shorthand for something else specific rather than in principle.
A well aimed shot at PCA [1] can often solve your problem. Or at least, tell you what the problem looks like. This is just an example, but IMHBO people waste their time learning ML and not learning mathematics and statistics.
IMHBO I still think that self-driving cars can be solved by defining a list of 1000 or so rules, by hand, by humans, and by consensus. The computer vision part is the ML part.
I could not agree more about self driving cars. They will disrupt and cause us to actually look at our terrible transportation infastructure, not learn to survive in it.
That is great for building incredible open source software and a lot of other things that I would not be able to do given a 1000 years. However (again IMHBO) a specific ML and any other specific application of stastistics or mathematics becomes really tricky once your use case is explicitly defined.
You then need intimate and deep knowledge of the tools that you are using (e.g.: Should I even use NN? Should I even use genetic algorithms? Should I even use x?) but ML for most people is shorthand for NN and its variants or maybe shorthand for something else specific rather than in principle.
A well aimed shot at PCA [1] can often solve your problem. Or at least, tell you what the problem looks like. This is just an example, but IMHBO people waste their time learning ML and not learning mathematics and statistics.
IMHBO I still think that self-driving cars can be solved by defining a list of 1000 or so rules, by hand, by humans, and by consensus. The computer vision part is the ML part.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_component_analysis