Machine learning is a technical science and, like any technical subject, uses a mathematical language to formulate ideas. A growing number of solutions are trying to automate the whole process of machine learning, but if a person does not understand the mathematical formalism underlying the algorithms, it is impossible to test and debug models that can lead to false conclusions.

Python is data scientists’ preferred programming language. If machine learning researchers decide to open source their work they will most likely do it in python. Therefore, the course starts by introducing python concepts and packages that are useful for data analysis. This part of the program also describes data structures, relational and non-relational databases, means of interacting with databases, manipulating data and merging datasets from different sources.

This module starts with an introduction to machine learning: how it is organized, what are the sub branches of machine learning, fundamental differences between these approaches and types of problems they are designed to solve.