If you are just like me, coming from a background that has nothing to do with mathematics or statistics and you want to get into data science, then this guide is for you. It will show you how to get into the amazing world of data science without having an overwhelming sense of inadequacy or a feeling of not being good enough.
I started my programming journey learning HTML and CSS. After going through a thousand articles, I realized that I wanted to solve problems using data science. And so, here is the path I took.
I learned the fundamentals of the Python programming language. The first tutorial I ever watched was on freecodecamp. It was a really good place to start, Mike did a really good job explaining the basics. I augmented this knowledge with resources from w3schools. Understanding lists, sets, and dictionaries properly will come in handy as you progress The R programming language is also a very good language for data science.
I took a data science course on codecademy. This course taught me essential libraries like NumPy and Pandas for analysis of the data. NumPy is for numerical computation while pandas is for table manipulation. I was also introduced to Matplotlib which is a great library for data visualization. Seaborn is also for data visualization but you don't need it just yet. The course provides capstone projects which helped solidify my knowledge of these libraries. Datacamp and 365datascience are also great sites for learning data science
You must have been wondering, "so where does the maths come in?" As you make progress in solving problems, you will realize there are some mathematical problems you may not understand and it's fine. Don't worry, Just learn them one topic after the other. Don't get overwhelmed by the amount of maths you don't know yet. The most frequent topics you'll come across are linear algebra, statistics, probability, and calculus. I will be sharing some resources on these topics in subsequent blogposts.
I'm still learning, yesterday, I learned about POLYNOMIAL REGRESSION. I'm taking it one step at a time and I think you should do.
I hope you enjoyed this read and I hope I can continue to share my experiences with you.
Till my next post, Komoni