AI Insights

50+ Top Resources to Build Your 2022 Data Science Portfolio

December 20, 2020


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A step by step guide, with 50+ resources to make 2021 your year of meaningful Data Science.

Authors: Rohith Paul

“Listening to the data is important… but so is experience and intuition. After all, what is intuition at its best but large amounts of data of all kinds filtered through a human brain rather than a math model?” — Andrew Lang

Step 1: Math & Stats for Data Science

One of the most important steps as Data Science is a quantitative domain and core mathematical foundations will serve as a base for your learning.

Probability

Probability is the measure of the likelihood that an event will occur. A lot of data science is based on attempting to measure the likelihood of events, everything from the odds of an advertisement getting clicked on, to the probability of failure for a part on an assembly line.

Online Courses

Books

Statistics

Once you have a firm grasp on probability theory you can move on to learning about statistics, which is the general branch of mathematics that deals with analyzing and interpreting data.

Online Courses

Books

Multivariable Calculus & Linear Algebra

The studies of vector spacing and linear mapping between these spaces. It is used heavily in machine learning, and if you really want to understand how these algorithms work, you will need to build a basic understanding of Linear Algebra.

Online courses and videos

Books

Step 2: Learn to Code

Data Science

Photo by Kevin Ku on Unsplash

Python

Python is an interpreted, high-level programming language. Python allows programmers to use different programming styles to create simple or complex programs, get quicker results and write code almost as if speaking in a human language. It was named after the comedy troupe Monty Python in 1991 and is one of the official languages at Google.

python

Morioh.com

Resources to learn Python

R programming

R is one of the best programming languages for analysis and visualization with its expansive community and interactive visualization tool and packages like ggplot2 making it one amongst the most used languages in Analysis and Data Science

Resources to learn R programming

Step 3: Machine Learning and Algorithms

AI skills

Photo by Hitesh Choudhary on Unsplash

Online courses

University online courses

Books

The importance of data preprocessing

Before working on a Machine Learning process your data needs to be clean for modeling. Often neglected but one of the most important skills. Here are some resources that will help you in data preprocessing:

Visualizing the data

Data visualization

Source: Canva

To better understand the data it is important to visualize the data to find out the correlation between different variables. Here are some resources that can get you started with data visualization:

Cloud Computing

One other domain whose knowledge is essential for a Machine Learning project is Cloud Computing because Machine learning systems tend to work better on cloud computing servers. This is because of the following reasons — low cost of operations, scalability, and huge processing power to analyze the huge amount of data. So, the blend of machine learning with cloud computing is beneficial for both technologies. If you want to get started with cloud computing here are some resources which you can refer to:

Step 4: Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision and Reinforcement Learning

Online courses

University videos

Books

Step 5: Connect, Learn & Grow with the Community

Data Science team

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

1. Join collaborative challenges

Work with collaborators all over the world solving real-world problems such as Hunger, Sexual Harassment, Forest Fires, and PTSD while further boosting your skills in teams of 40 to 50 collaborators per AI Challenge.

2. Join competitions

Challenge your skills and broaden your existing skills by competing with other (aspiring) data scientists.

3. Go to (online) meetups and connect with fellows

Meetup

Meetup

4. Join Communities like PyData and PyCon

PyData provides a forum for the international community of users and developers of data analysis tools to share ideas and learn from each other.

5. Attend (online) conferences

One of the best ways to learn about the latest developments is by attending conferences in the space. Besides helping professionals gain knowledge through hands-on workshops, these events and conferences also provide a platform to network with industry peers and understand the latest development in this space.

Here are some amazing conferences, which you can attend online or hopefully offline soon.

Step 6 — Operating at the Scale of Big Data

Big data refers to extremely large data sets that may be analyzed computationally to reveal patterns, trends, and associations, especially relating to human behavior and interactions.

Big Data

Photo by Joshua Sortino on Unsplash

The Spark framework

Understand the advantage of the in-memory cluster memory framework.

Scalable Machine Learning on Big Data using Apache Spark by IBM

Spark

Source: Spark

Additional resources

If you’re interested in getting a little closer to the hardware used in deep learning, there are some good courses that introduce programming for specific architectures. All require proficiency in C and are relatively advanced:

And if you want to build your own deep learning server from scratch,

Step 7: Stay up to date 

The following websites will make sure you don’t miss any important updates.

arXiv.org subject classes:

Semantic Scholar searches:

Data Science

Photo by Clark Tibbs on Unsplash

I wish you all the best for this amazing journey and hope that you will bring a positive change in society using AI!!

Ready to test your skills?

If you’re interested in collaborating, apply to join an Omdena project at: https://www.omdena.com/projects

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