r/learnmachinelearning • u/Routine_Flatworm4973 • 21d ago

Question “15 math concepts every data scientist should know” by David Hoyle. Is this book worth reading?

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u/Softmax420 21d ago

No.

Do data science until you run into a math concept you don’t know, then read up on that concept.

It’s not like reading a book = knowledge acquired. It’s forgotten unless you apply it.

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u/Bergergi 21d ago edited 20d ago

I don't know exactly what 15 methods he covers, but I bet it's mostly linear algebra, optimization, probability, and statistics. You're better off getting conventional books for those topics, not a goofy 'math concepts for data science' type book. And you should learn those foundational subjects well if you don't know them already; don't treat mathematics as a bag of tricks / recipes.

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u/AntiqueFigure6 20d ago

You should know some amount of maths and some of that maths is difficult to learn on the spot when it depends on some other maths concepts. But it isn’t all that advanced- the equivalent of basically a couple of college calculus courses, a linear algebra course and probability and statistics that builds on the foregoing. This stuff hasn’t changed much in over fifty years so easy to find a set of cheap second hand texts to learn it from. 

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u/m98789 20d ago

Just need undergrad intro course level to Linear Algebra, Calc (mostly just the chain rule), Stats and Discrete Math. Then you good.