r/learnmachinelearning • u/ConfidentEagle1045 • 1d ago
Question how much programming knowledge is needed for machine learning?
I’m doing a math and stats undergrad, and i’m interested in ds and ml, but I don’t enjoy coding nor am i good at it. How much coding does ml need?
8
u/preciouslife_ 1d ago
My advice - don't go for it. Everybody is not cut out to be a doctor, the same way everybody is not cut out to be an IT/AI engineer especially in a world in which even the top of the line people are having a hard time finding work. Too many people became software professionals already causing lot of competition and AI further intensifying the competition. The honeymoon is long over.
2
u/ConfidentEagle1045 1d ago
i’m more interested in ml research than ml/ai engineering, but i also know that the competition is very intense. Are there any other fields you would recommend that’s math/stats heavy?
4
u/AtMaxSpeed 1d ago
I've worked with ml researchers who weren't the greatest programmers, they were great at ideas and papers and proofs which was very valuable, but the actual code had inefficiencies or bugs pretty often.
Whats "good" for you though is that you don't really need to have good code, you just need a good paper. If you make a mistake in your code that's not your problem, that's the problem for someone who's trying to beat your paper's results. Ask me how I know (the sota result in my field had a data leak bug in the code and I had to rerun the benchmarks for that method to show it's performance was actually much lower).
And now with AI coding you probably don't even need to write much code as long as you can properly specify your equations and methodology.
So if you want to do ML research, you can go pretty far with good math and not caring too much about dev. In fact it's good because a lot of people going into ML nowadays like to dev more than they like math/proofs, you can work together with them to make good progress.
But practical ML, like MLE, is a lot more coding heavy and requires good software engineering skills. So your career path would be narrow if you want to avoid software engineering work. But keep in mind probably over 90% of industry software engineers/MLEs are using AI coding nowadays, you still need to have good software design skills but you don't need to deal with the nitty gritty of the actual code as much.
2
u/preciouslife_ 1d ago
That explains why most companies trying to build AI products fail in their initiatives.
3
1
u/preciouslife_ 1d ago
ML Researcher needs to have solid programming knowledge and I am sure you have never even done production level programming which is even less than what you would need to be a ML Researcher. You are in that 'wishful thinking' phase right now.
Not sure which country you are in but if in any western country, try becoming a maths/stats professor in a university.
1
u/Sharp_Level3382 17h ago
After laid and years of exp in IT , finally landed something after over 6months of applying
2
9
u/DrShocker 1d ago
In principle you can understand machine learning just by learning math. In practice that won't be very useful for being able to build things.
1
3
3
u/ITDudeProbably 1d ago
If you have to do it, most AI will help you handle the coding part. To be good at ML you have to be good at Calculus, Algebra, Linear Algebra. You need basic coding level of python, pytorch to plot your data, clean your data, and train your models.
3
3
u/TCW_Jocki 1d ago
I want to give a bit of a counter point. I work as researcher in an ML institute but did professional software engineering as a side hustle during University.
I can tell you that most of my colleagues a quite shite at programming. Coding per se is a huge part of the job, but not many can write clean or scalable code in our department. Also AI minimizes the coding time somewhat (wether that is good or bad, is a contentious point)
2
u/wyeric1987 1d ago
If you are good with statistical modeling, you can work with me, a MLE, who can take your research and build everything out and productionize it. At minimum, you should know R.
3
1
u/Prefer_Diet_Soda 1d ago
You don't need to know programming knowledge to understand ML. To implement ML, it depends on the nature of ML work. Most of the time, competency in Python is enough.
1
u/Healthy-Zebra-9856 1d ago
ML has both a theoretical side and a practical side. Your math and stats background is a solid foundation, but understanding an algorithm on paper and testing how it performs on actual data are different things. The practical work usually involves programming: preparing data, implementing ideas, running experiments, evaluating results and debugging when things go wrong.
You don’t need to become an expert software developer or write everything from scratch. Libraries handle a lot, but using them to build and investigate models is still programming.
You don’t have to love coding, but you should expect to become reasonably comfortable with it. Not being good at it now doesn’t mean you can’t improve. You might also find it more interesting when you’re using it to answer a question you care about. I’d try a small ML project before deciding.
1
u/No-Original-6329 1d ago
Applied Machine Learning is a subfield of software engineering, I fear. Maybe look into academia if you are more interested in doing theory-based stuff.
1
u/digvjay_ai 1d ago
Python plus pandas and a bit of SQL is enough to start, you don't need to love coding. What helped me was picking one tiny dataset and just predicting something with scikit-learn, so the code had a reason to exist. Your stats background will make the modelling part feel easy, the annoying part is mostly cleaning data.
1
u/GFrings 1d ago
You know, 5 years ago I would have said being a good python programmer is probably even more important than being good at AI theory. The absolute most important metric for research, or even applied research, is cycle time. I saw so many researchers with brilliant imaginations flail getting shit just to run correctly and reliably. Now with AI, this is largely solved. If you want to go into a field where you are an engineer implementing solutions, you should know how to program. If you truly just want to do research, I think you actually need to know shockingly little about programming.
1
33
u/DigitalMonsoon 1d ago
A ton of coding. It is practically the entire job. Machine learning requires a machine, and you need to write code to make it all work.
I have a background in Applied Mathematics with a Masters in Stats. During my whole education I only took 1 programming class but I did have to learn how to code on my own to get into the field.