MLCourse.ai : Fall 2019

I came across MLCourse.ai mentioned in many articles when I was looking at good introductory courses to learn Data Science from. It was always listed in the top few. I had tried my hand at MLCourse.ai in Spring 2019 but could not complete it. However I was determined to finish it in the Fall version. And I am glad I did. This could be the last live version of the course. 

There is no certificate and the Yuri is clear this course is only to learn skills. Only the top 100 will be have their name mentioned in the course site. Sadly I didn’t finish in the top 100. 

So what stands out ?

Pros

1. Kaggle competitions !!! 3 required 1 optional. Lots of learning in feature engineering, EDA and hyper parameter turning and model training. So many high value kernels from the past MLCourse.ai participants to learn from.
2. Vibrant, Highly Knowledgeable and helpful community. The slack community of participants is very interactive and helpful. Clarifications / Doubts/ Discussing strategies /Commiserating on the struggles of clearing the baseline and celebrating clearing it !!! Cannot underestimate the value of a good community. It was sheer fun to be here.
3. Quiz and Assignments. The perfect blend of hand holding and learning. I thought these were simple enough to understand but not so simple that one could breeze through them. 
4. Worked solutions. There are many demo assignments with solutions.

Cons

1. Lots of material. Difficult to check them all out while doing the course. 

Kaggle

 

Me ? 

So where did I end up ? I fared reasonably well in the Quizzes and Assignments. Couldn’t clear the baselines for the first two competitions at all !! However I guess I did learn because in the final DOTA competition I ended up in the top 20% which I did not expect at all. Rank around 200.(Many have same marks)

The competitions — mlcourse.ai

Some participants have done this course 4 times. Some have come with hardly any knowledge of programming and ended up in the top 20. There were ML lecturers and data science practitioners too. In the end impostor's syndrome is not unknown but all one can do is try one’s best !!

Feeling the withdrawal symptoms !!