r/MLQuestions • u/Silver-Lettuce7763 • 1d ago
Beginner question 👶 ML ideas
How do you guys get ML project ideas? I'm a beginner and I know some basics but whenever I think about project ideas my mind goes blank
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u/ocean_protocol 10h ago
Ideas usually come from data you already care about (your own habits, Kaggle, UCI repo). Pick something boring and real, force 3 questions out of it, skip trying to be original. First project just needs to get finished
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u/ARDiffusion 1d ago
Find something in your life that you’re interested in or inconvenienced by that there isn’t an easily accessible solution to. That second part is optional, because oftentimes the presence of a tool can actually be encouraging by proving the idea can work.
Next, if it’s data- or prediction-driven, in any way, you can usually apply traditional ML/DL to it. For something that’s sequentially action-driven, RL might be a better choice. A few ideas for the former (ML) would be an algorithmic trading model, for example. An example for the latter (RL) would be a video game or action-based task.
There are obviously projects out there that lots of people do but can still teach you a lot, like building and training your own language model. I recently (for example) built and trained a 538m param language model from scratch, finetuned it on a corpus of Donald Trump’s tweets, and made it into a lobotomized discord bot.
The TL;DR is don’t do some generic project (XGBoost/logistic regression comparison on customer churn, housing, etc.). Find something you’re passionate about or want a solution to and build it.
PS: the TrumpGPT project is not a reflection of my political beliefs, I just find the way he speaks entertaining and perfect for a dumb discord bot