AI, Machine Learning & Statistics
How artificial intelligence, machine learning and statistics differ, where they overlap, and why you need all three: data and data preparation, descriptive statistics, supervised and unsupervised learning, model evaluation, AI ethics and bias, and AI/ML on AWS.
Interactive lessons on artificial intelligence, machine learning and statistics — three words often used as if they mean the same thing. They don't. AI is the goal (smart behaviour), machine learning is a method (learning patterns from data), and statistics is the toolkit for reasoning about data and uncertainty. Work through the lessons in order; each one is a self-contained interactive page with quizzes, drag-the-data charts and hands-on activities. New lessons are added as the course grows.
What the course covers:
- Introduction: how AI, machine learning, deep learning and statistics nest and overlap
- Data and data preparation: collecting, cleaning and splitting data
- Descriptive statistics: summarising data with centre, spread and shape
- Supervised and unsupervised learning: regression, classification and clustering
- Model evaluation: measuring how well a model works on data it has never seen
- AI ethics and bias, and building AI/ML on AWS
Free courses and tutorials to go further:
- Elements of AI — a gentle, non-technical introduction to AI (University of Helsinki)
- Google Machine Learning Crash Course — practical ML with exercises
- Andrew Ng — Machine Learning Specialization (Coursera, free to audit)
- Khan Academy — Statistics and probability
- Seeing Theory — visual introduction to probability and statistics (Brown University)
- TensorFlow Playground and Teachable Machine — train a model in your browser
- AWS Skill Builder — free AI/ML learning plans on AWS
Lessons
Videos
Books & reading
- 📖 James, Witten, Hastie, Tibshirani & Taylor — An Introduction to Statistical Learning (free PDF, R & Python editions)
- 📖 Hastie, Tibshirani & Friedman — The Elements of Statistical Learning (free PDF)
- 📖 Russell & Norvig — Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach
- 📖 Bishop — Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (free PDF)
- 📖 Goodfellow, Bengio & Courville — Deep Learning (free online)
- 📖 Deisenroth, Faisal & Ong — Mathematics for Machine Learning (free PDF)
- 📖 Diez, Çetinkaya-Rundel & Barr — OpenIntro Statistics (free PDF)
- 📖 Downey — Think Stats: Exploratory Data Analysis in Python (free online)
- 📖 Zhang, Lipton, Li & Smola — Dive into Deep Learning (free, with code)
- 📖 Amazon SageMaker Developer Guide