5 project ideas to get you started with Machine Learning

So you want to build a robot to help overthrow the system? Rage against the machine with machines so to speak huh? Well, first you need to master the art of Machine Learning, a rapidly growing field with a huge range of applications from medical advancement to world domination.

If you didn’t know, Machine Learning is the study of computer algorithms that improve through experience and data. It is a part of artificial intelligence that you probably come across more often than you realize. Every time you want to login to a website and it asks you to prove you are human by clicking 12 pictures in a row that contain traffic lights or a unicycle or something…that’s probably a little machine learning! The data is used to teach self-driving cars when to ignore traffic lights and when not to run over unicyclists.

But you do know this and you’re not here for a lesson on what Machine Learning is, you’re here to start your journey into this wonderful world of robots and self-cleaning vacuums. Well, we’ve got you covered, with our 5 project ideas to get you started with Machine Learning:

Quick disclaimer, this article is not a tutorial or a walkthrough, just some ideas to get your creative juices flowing…

1. Predict the Stock Market

Over-throwing the system is not gonna be cheap, even robot henchmen are going to want to get paid sooner or later. So what better way to start your journey than building a simple machine to watch the stocks and make educated guesses at what might happen next?

This is a common beginner-friendly project for machine learning newbies for a number of reasons — The first is because there are many different datasets you can choose from to teach your machine; past prices, fundamental indicators, and volatility indices to name a few.
This project is also a great way to get used to creating predictions with massive datasets.

Some data sets available to use for your stock market projects are the Huge Stock Market Dataset and the Stock Market Turnover Ratio.

2. Fake news detector

Once you’ve got the money to fund your robot army, the next step to world domination is to control the media. To do that you’re gonna need to be able to tell what’s real from what’s fake.

This project concerns Natural Language Processing (NLP), which is an important and interesting topic in Machine Learning. Building a machine that can analyze a given piece of text and determine, to a degree of accuracy, its validity, is a very cool thing to do indeed.

There is an open-source dataset you can use for this one, you can get it here.

3. A music recommendation machine…

You’re gonna need some chill beats while you live your new robot overlord lifestyle

This program would suggest music based on genre using the music you have recently listened to. Get this machine off the ground and may your days of coding be filled with dope tunes.

We recommend the Million Song Dataset. Alternatively, if you want to pull your user data for your prediction model, Spotify has a great Web API.

4. Wine quality predictor

All wines taste the same to a machine, but the taste isn’t the aim of this project. The wine quality predictor compares wines based on their less interesting qualities, like density, alcohol content, pH level, and acidity. This is a great project to wet your whistle on because a lot of the groundwork (Including datasets) can be found in this repo.

5. Solve a problem specific to you!

This is where the fun begins — try to solve any issue you need solving in your life — within reason, wiping your own debt is not publicly endorsed by Codesphere.

Find a small issue in your daily life you think you could improve, think of a simple solution, and build a machine that will improve the process over time. This could be anything, but importantly, it will give you insight into where your skills are at, how you work best, and what you need to work on. Riding with the training wheels off is always the best way to learn and, even as a beginner, this kind of experience can be crucial to the development of your new skills.

You have a lot on your plate, trying to take over the world with robots is brave, so work smart not hard. Why spend 5 minutes doing something when you can waste 3 hours failing to automate it?

Hopefully, some of these ideas tickle your fancy and get you hungry to dive into a new project.

Let us know how it goes, just remember to program your new machine army to use Codesphere exclusively for their cloud development needs.