Rust + Machine Learning: 003
This is part of my participation in the #100DaysOfCode challenge. This round, I’m learning Rust and Machine Learning (ML) and developing violette: a portable ML system and JavaScript API in Rust.
After my most humbling experience the day before yesterday, in which I learned that I do not have the depth of knowledge in both programming and mathematics to simply drop into machine learning (ML), I went searching, and found, a series of resources that will help get me up to speed:
The first resource I stumbled upon is the book “Introduction to Machine Learning,” by Alex Smola and S.V.N. Vishwanathan. Upon taking a cursory glance through some of the initial content, I determined this book takes a much more gentle approach to introducing topics that are central to ML. And after diving in and reading through much of the first chapter, my initial determination was correct. This book, indeed, serves as a solid introduction to ML.
This book also lists a number of resources and references, by which I discovered another: “Introduction to Probability,” by Dimitri P. Bertsekas and John N. Tsitsiklis. The authors of “Introduction to Machine Learning” describe “Introduction to Probability” as “a very gentle and detailed discussion.” Given the rude awakening I had earlier with learning ML, “very gentle” sounds nice.
And finally, I discovered “Mathematics for Machine Learning,” by Marc Peter Deisenroth, A. Aldo Faisal, and Cheng Soon Ong. Per the book’s website:
The book is not intended to cover advanced machine learning techniques because there are already plenty of books doing this. Instead, we aim to provide the necessary mathematical skills to read those other books.
Considering it was the math that took me for a loop, this book is right up my alley. And, to much gratitude and appreciation, the authors have so generously provided the text freely available in PDF format.
Already, this seems like a fairly hefty curriculum in which to immerse myself over the next 96+ days. I am, however, committed. Over the next few days, I’ll determine how best to approach the three texts so I can read them in tandem. I have a rather comprehensive reading database in Notion that I’ve built up over the past few months, so I’ll keep a record of my progress across all three texts.
On top of all this, I’ll continue working through The Rust Programming Language in my journey to learn Rust. Hopefully my foray through these three textbooks and my Rust journey will coincide at a point in the near future where I can really begin building out my proposed project.
03/100
