Congratulations on completing the course! Where should you go from here?

The key to improving your Machine Learning and Data Science skills or finding a job in the industry is practice, practice, practice.

By solving actual problems you will not only internalise the techniques and tools from this course but also ace any interview and land a job. Why? Because you’ll be able to talk about your projects in detail and show evidence of your skills to potential employers.

So where should you look for interesting problems and how should you practice? I recommend one of two approaches: 1) participating in Kaggle competitions or 2) working on a particular problem that interests you. In either case, I highly recommend you write about your progress, your challenges, and publish your results on a blog.

Kaggle Competitions

What are Kaggle competitions? Companies pose bounties on kaggle.com for the best machine learning model to solve a particular problem. For example, can you help a company understand customer loyalty or predict earthquakes or use the news to predict stock prices? If you win a competition you can get anything from actual prize money to a job. See the challenges available here: www.kaggle.com/challenge-yourself

Your Own Project

If you’d rather tackle a problem of your own, then simply follow the workflow taught in the course:

• Define the problem and formulate your question

• Gather the data

• Clean, explore, and visualise the data

• Train your machine learning algorithm

• Evaluate how you’re doing and try to improve

One of the hardest parts will be finding the right data, so here are some of my favourite places to start looking:

• UK Government Data

• United States Census API

• Curated datasets by Figure-Eight.com

• cooldatasets.com

• List of Awesome Datasets

• 20 Cool Datasets by Oliver Cameron

Blog about your projects

Sign up to Medium.com or create a Wordpress Blog. There you can share your progress, discuss the challenges that you faced, and share your results. Think of your blog as a way to reflect on your work and explain your reasoning. Your blog will become your extended CV that provides employers with evidence for your skills and showcases your passion for data science and machine learning!

Check out these insightful posts for inspiration:

Analyzing 1.1 Billion NYC Taxi and Uber Trips, with a Vengeance by Todd Schneider

Should Travelers Avoid Flying Airlines that have had Crashes in the Past? by Nate Silver