Chapter 2: Machine Learning Basics

This chapter covers some basic concepts of machine learning that will be used and referenced in this book. This is the bare minimum you need to know in order to use DataRobot effectively. Experienced data scientists can safely skip this chapter. It is not the intention of this chapter to give you a comprehensive understanding of statistics or machine learning, but just a refresher of some key ideas and concepts. Also, the focus is on practical aspects of what you need to know in order to understand the core ideas without going into too much detail. It might be tempting to jump in and let DataRobot automatically build the models, but doing that without a basic understanding could backfire. If you are leading a data science team, please make sure that you have experienced data scientists in your teams who are mentoring others and that there are other governance processes in place.

Some of these concepts will come up again during the hands-on examples...