Learning Resources for the Uninitiated - Machine Learning Edition

[bevinahally]

Going off of @gwaygenomics's post in the Cognoma repo (cognoma/cognoma#15) , and @cgreene's suggestion this might be a good place to discuss ML-specific resources for the uninitiated, especially for others like me who are new to the bioinformatics domain and perhaps last studied biology in high school.

[hhummel]

My knowledge of bioinformatics would be obsolete if I had any, but I do have some suggestions for machine learning that I like: "An Introduction to Statistical Learning" by James, Witten, Hastie and Tibshirani is efficient and approachable in introducing the most important ML algorithms. The code exercises are in R rather than Python, but the exposition of the ideas is code-agnostic. Hastie and Tibshirani teach a companion MOOC.

I also like "Data Science from Scratch" by Joel Grus, where he develops of the algorithms himself in Python to teach what they do, rather than calling the standard packages like Numpy. He starts from the beginning, including a brief but comprehensive tutorial on Python.