Machine Learning for Beginners - A Curriculum

🌍 Travel around the world as we explore Machine Learning by means of world cultures 🌍

Azure Cloud Advocates at Microsoft are pleased to offer a 12-week, 24-lesson curriculum all about traditional Machine Learning. In this lesson group, you will learn about what is sometimes called 'classic' ML, using primarily Scikit-Learn as a library and avoiding deep learning, which is covered in our 'AI for Beginners' curriculum. Travel with us around the world as we apply these classic techniques to data from many areas of the world. Each lesson includes pre- and post-lesson quizzes, written instructions to complete the lesson, a solution, an assignment and more. Our project-based pedagogy allows you to learn while building, a proven way for new skills to 'stick'.

Hearty thanks to our authors (list all authors here)

Teachers, we have included some suggestions on how to use this curriculum. If you would like to create your own lessons, we have also included a lesson template

Students, to use this curriculum on your own, fork the entire repo and complete the exercises on your own:

• Start with a pre-lecture quiz
• Read the lecture and complete the activities, pausing and reflecting at each knowledge check.
• Try to create the projects by comprehending the lessons rather than copying the solution code; however that code is available in the /solution folders in each project-oriented lesson.
• Take the post-lecture quiz
• Complete the challenge
• Complete the assignment
• Consider forming a study group with friends and go through the content together.
• For further study, we recommend following Microsoft Learn modules and learning paths.

Future space for Promo Video

Click the image above for a video about the project and the folks who created it!

Pedagogy

We have chosen two pedagogical tenets while building this curriculum: ensuring that it is hands-on project-based and that it includes frequent quizzes. In addition, this curriculum has a common theme to give it cohesion.

By ensuring that the content aligns with projects, the process is made more engaging for students and retention of concepts will be augmented. In addition, a low-stakes quiz before a class sets the intention of the student towards learning a topic, while a second quiz after class ensures further retention. This curriculum was designed to be flexible and fun and can be taken in whole or in part. The projects start small and become increasingly complex by the end of the 12 week cycle.

Find our Code of Conduct, Contributing, and Translation guidelines. We welcome your constructive feedback!

Each lesson includes:

• optional sketchnote
• optional supplemental video
• pre-lesson warmup quiz
• written lesson
• for project-based lessons, step-by-step guides on how to build the project
• knowledge checks
• a challenge
• supplemental reading
• assignment
• post-lesson quiz

A note about quizzes: All quizzes are contained in this app, for 48 total quizzes of three questions each. They are linked from within the lessons but the quiz app can be run locally; follow the instruction in the quiz-app folder.

Lesson Number	Project Name/Group	Concepts Taught	Learning Objectives	Linked Lesson	Author
01	Introduction	Introduction to Machine Learning	Learn the basic concepts behind Machine Learning	lesson	Amy
02	Introduction	The History of Machine Learning	Learn the history underlying this field	lesson	Amy
03	Introduction to Regression	Regression	Get started with Python and Scikit-Learn for Regression models	lesson	Jen
04	North American Pumpkin Prices 🎃	Regression	Visualize and clean data in preparation for ML	lesson	Jen
05	North American Pumpkin Prices 🎃	Regression	Build a Linear Regression model	lesson	Jen
06	North American Pumpkin Prices 🎃	Regression	Build a Logistic Regression model	lesson	Jen
07	Introduction to Clustering	Clustering	tbd	lesson
08	Delicious Asian Recipes 🍜	Clustering	tbd	lesson
09	Delicious Asian Recipes 🍜	Clustering	tbd	lesson
10	Delicious Asian Recipes 🍜	Clustering	tbd	lesson
11	Introduction to Classification	Classification		lesson	Paige
12	Interesting Maya Architecture 🦜	Classification		lesson	Paige
13	Interesting Maya Architecture 🦜	Classification		lesson	Paige
14	Interesting Maya Architecture 🦜	Classification		lesson	Paige
15	Introduction to NLP	Natural Language Processing	tbd	lesson	Stephen
16	Romantic Hotels of Europe ♥️	Natural Language Processing	tbd	lesson	Stephen
17	Romantic Hotels of Europe ♥️	Natural Language Processing	tbd	lesson	Stephen
18	Romantic Hotels of Europe ♥️	Natural Language Processing	tbd	lesson	Stephen
19	Introduction to Time Series Forecasting	Time Series	tbd	lesson	Francesca
20	Power Usage in India ⚡️	Time Series	tbd	lesson	Francesca
21	Introduction to Reinforcement Learning	Reinforcement Learning	tbd	lesson
22	A fancy French mousetrap 🍫	Reinforcement Learning	tbd	lesson
23	Future	The Ethics of Machine Learning	What are the important ethical issues apparent now and how will they impact the field going forward?	lesson	Tomomi
24	Future	The Future of Machine Learning	What are the important trends that will shape the future of ML?	lesson

Offline access

You can run this documentation offline by using Docsify. Fork this repo, install Docsify on your local machine, and then in the root folder of this repo, type docsify serve. The website will be served on port 3000 on your localhost: localhost:3000.