Biggest Mistake I Made When Starting Machine Learning, And How To Avoid It

Last Updated on August 22, 2019

When I first got started in machine learning I implemented algorithms by hand. It was really slow going.

I was a terrible programmer at the time. I was trying to figure out the algorithms from books, how to use them on problems and how to write code – all at the same time. This was the biggest mistake I made when getting started. It made everything 3-times harder and killed my motivation.

A friend of mine suggested I look at Weka. I resisted. I was a student and a C-programmer and I didn’t want to get into Java.

Later, I was looking into decision tree algorithms and I learned that Weka had an implementation of C4.5 (a really powerful method).

I downloaded Weka and discovered that in addition to the Java API, Weka had a fully interactive graphical interface for loading data, running algorithms and reviewing results. Basically, all of the things I was trying to figure out how to do and implement myself, but in a GUI.

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