📚 Machine Learning Topics for Data Science
1. Foundations (Before ML)
Linear algebra basics (vectors, matrices, dot product)
Probability & statistics (mean, variance, distributions, Bayes
theorem)
Data preprocessing (missing values, scaling, encoding, feature
engineering)
Train-test split, cross-validation
2. Core ML Concepts
Supervised vs. Unsupervised learning
Bias-variance tradeoff
Overfitting & underfitting
Evaluation metrics
o Regression → MAE, MSE, RMSE, R²
o Classification → Accuracy, Precision, Recall, F1, ROC-AUC
o Clustering → Silhouette score
3. Supervised Learning Algorithms
Regression
o Linear Regression
o Polynomial Regression
o Regularization (Lasso, Ridge, ElasticNet)
Classification
o Logistic Regression
o k-Nearest Neighbors (kNN)
o Decision Trees
o Random Forests
o Gradient Boosting (XGBoost, LightGBM, CatBoost)
o Support Vector Machines (SVM)
o Naïve Bayes
4. Unsupervised Learning Algorithms
k-Means Clustering
Hierarchical Clustering
DBSCAN
Dimensionality Reduction
o PCA (Principal Component Analysis)
o t-SNE
o UMAP
5. Advanced ML Concepts
Ensemble methods (Bagging, Boosting, Stacking)
Feature selection & importance
Hyperparameter tuning (GridSearchCV, RandomSearch, Bayesian
Optimization)
Imbalanced data techniques (SMOTE, class weights, undersampling)
Time Series Forecasting
o ARIMA, SARIMA
o Prophet
o LSTM (deep learning crossover)
6. Neural Networks & Deep Learning (Intro Level for DS)
Basics of Neural Networks (Perceptron, Feedforward)
Backpropagation & Gradient Descent
Activation functions (ReLU, Sigmoid, Tanh, Softmax)
CNNs (for images)
RNNs/LSTMs (for sequences)
(You don’t need to go very deep unless aiming for ML Engineer/AI
roles.)
7. Practical ML Skills
Model deployment basics (Flask/FastAPI, Streamlit)
ML pipelines (scikit-learn, PyCaret)
Handling large datasets (Dask, Spark basics)
Experiment tracking (MLflow, Weights & Biases)
8. Special Topics (Optional but Valuable)
Recommender Systems (Collaborative Filtering, Matrix Factorization)
Natural Language Processing (Bag of Words, TF-IDF, Word
Embeddings)
Explainable AI (SHAP, LIME)
✅ That’s the full roadmap of ML for Data Science.
For a data analyst → data scientist transition, you mostly need:
Supervised & unsupervised basics
Feature engineering
Evaluation metrics
A few algorithms (Linear/Logistic Regression, Trees, Random Forest,
k-Means, PCA)
