Could someone please offer me some guidance on some kind of particular, SPECIFIC project that I could attemp, to “get my feet wet, so to speak” [closed]

Question

I am COMPLETELY new to the field of Data Science, mainly because every employer I have worked for, simply COULDN'T sell any customers anything that would use techniques learned in this field.

Of particular interest to me is machine learning/Predictive Analysis.

I have attempted many "test projects" myself, but I seem to NEED some sort of outside "catalyst" to tell me a specific goal, and a specific set of guidelines, when I am trying to learn something. Otherwise, I tend to lose focus, and jump from one interesting topic to the next, without ever gaining any experience.

Thank you!!

Answer 1

I would suggest Kaggle learning projects - http://www.kaggle.com/competitions

Look for the ones in the 101 section that offer knowledge. There's many pre-made solutions ready, which you can ingest and try variations of.

Also, I have bookmarked a Comprehensive learning path – Data Science in Python, which among other things gives a few answers to your specific question.

Answer 2

You can use some public data sets to play around with.

The iris flower data set is great for classification problems. As an example you can try to classify the flower species with k-nearest neighbor model or a decision tree (CART) model.

You can find this and other sample machine learning datasets here: http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets.html

This list identifies what type of machine learning tasks can be performed with each dataset.