The Start of my Machine Learning journey
During my studies at Imperial College London - 3ish years ago - I was introduced to the topic of Machine Learning, an area that I had always been interested about. At that time, not only I didn't know python, as “from sklearn.decomposition import PCA" wasn’t allowed. Therefore, we had to write the PCA (and other) algorithms in Matlab from scratch, which was great because it exposed us to the maths behind each algorithm.
After concluding my thesis (and paper): "Energy savings from an Ecological Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control: a Battery Electric Vehicle platoon investigation", which was presented at the 2019 European Control Conference in Napoli, I had finally time to focus on Machine Learning topics during my spare time through late hours and into weekends.
I started by doing the famous MOOC “Machine Learning - Andrew Ng”. Saying that the course was good is an understatement. I ended up spending a long time on the course as I was taking notes and revising daily; I was still behaving like a university student even without the exam at the end! Not only the theory is really detailed, but the coursework in Matlab allowed me to understand what’s going on under the hood. Given that I was already a heavy Matlab user, due to its usage throughout my entire academic journey, I could focus on the ML section.
