Why Another Data Science Learning Site?
Amidst a crowded field of free and inexpensive solutions for learning skills associated with data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence FastDatascience.Ai was born. Within that field some sites are excellent with basic skills that help to set foundations in statistics, probability, and applying those concepts to computers using scripting languages such as R or Python. Other sites are great resources for finding code that applies ever more sophisticated models to diverse data types such as deep learning applications to language, image, and audio data. There are even sites that focus on trying to explain these complex models in ever simpler ways to continue to inspire more intuition around how the practice of data science works.
But despite the excess of information available on a variety of data science topics, the large majority are built on canned examples where parts of the process are skipped, assumed, or not ever addressed and so are challenged in real-world applications. For example, someone may be able to download the MNIST data set to train a convolutional neural net to predict numerical digits from pixel matrices however it is rare that real-world data fit in such similar low resolution environments and so understanding how to properly process the data becomes a barrier for applying a CNN to real data.
Another key limitation to the existing landscape of data science learning sites is the lack of clear appreciation for the art that is so necessary to becoming your own unique flavor of data scientist. The reality is that data science encompasses a wide array of different skill sets, more than any one individual would ever want to master in their entirety. Moreover, the application of data science to solving problems, be they business, social, economic, or health problems, is often benefitted from applying domain knowledge that goes beyond data science altogether. Thus, learning how to creatively combine these diverse skill sets to emphasize one’s strengths hardly gets a mention but promises to enforce how to be more uniquely valuable in a data science career. If you want to know the recipe for fast data science success, it’s creativity!
Finally, I also recognized that few sites exist to help data science leaders learn from the experience of other data science leaders. Data science as a profession has seen tremendous growth and maturity over the last decade, leaving many leaders searching for information and ideas on how to effectively manage their own companies’ response to these trends.
To this end, FastDatascience.ai was conceived to fill these gaps by exploring a wide variety of data science topics with a core emphasis on:
- Being Creative
- Being Unafraid to Explore the Messiness of the Real-World
- Sharing Leadership Strategies
I would also be remiss to not specifically call out a few sites that have inspired me and of which are extremely valuable resources with similar missions as those described above:
