I’m not saying you need to be an expert in advanced calculus to do machine learning…
BUT, there is a big difference between someone that does vs someone that does NOT have a good foundation in stats when it comes to getting & explaining business results.
My thought process back in the day was to obtain a great foundation in stats and machine learning at the same time.
So here’s what helped me. I read a ton of books.
Here are the 3 books that helped me learn data science the most...
1. R for Data Science (Wickham & Grolemund) r4ds.had.co.nz
K-means is one of the most powerful algorithms for data scientists.
But it's confusing for beginners. Let's fix that:
1. What is K-means?
Is a popular unsupervised machine learning algorithm used for clustering. It's a core algorithm used for customer segmentation, inventory categorization, market segmentation, and even anomaly detection.
2. Unsupervised:
K-means is an unsupervised algorithm that is used on data with no labels or predefined outcomes. The goal is not to predict a target output, but to explore the structure of the data by identifying patterns, clusters, or relationships within the dataset.
A new paper shows how you can predict real purchase intent without asking people.
~90% of human test–retest reliability.
Here's what's inside the 28 page paper:
1. Problem with direct Likert from LLMs:
When you ask LLMs to output 1–5 ratings directly, the distributions are too narrow/skewed and don’t look like human survey data, limiting usefulness for concept testing.
Have the LLM write a short free-text purchase-intent statement, then map that text onto a 5-point Likert score using embedding cosine similarity to predefined anchor sentences (i.e., semantic matching instead of raw numbers).
Understanding P-Values is essential for improving regression models.
In 2 minutes, I'll crush your confusion.
1. The p-value:
A p-value in statistics is a measure used to assess the strength of the evidence against a null hypothesis.
2. Null Hypothesis (H₀):
The null hypothesis is the default position that there is no relationship between two measured phenomena or no association among groups. For example, under H₀, the regressor does not affect the outcome.