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Mathematics for AI: All the essential math

topics you need
Essential list of math topics for Machine Learning and Deep Learning.

Abhishek Parbhakar · Follow

Published in Towards Data Science
3 min read · Aug 10, 2018

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If AI is the secret sauce to make Pepper smarter! Then math is the air for all the essential ingredients to make that
sauce! Photo by Alex Knight on Unsplash

The relationship between AI and mathematics can be summed up as:

1.98K 7
 A person working in the field of AI who doesn’t know
math is like a politician who doesn’t know how to
persuade. Both have an inescapable area to work
upon!
I won’t spend any more time on importance of learning mathematics for AI and will
directly go to the main objective of this article.

A popular recommendation for learning mathematics for AI goes something like

this:

Learn linear algebra, probability, multivariate calculus, optimization and few

other topics

And then there is a list of courses and lectures that can be followed to
accomplish the same

Although the above approach is perfectly fine, I personally feel there is another
approach that is better especially for the people 1) who don’t have a solid
quantitative background and 2) cannot afford the time to do all the prerequisite
math courses. That is:

Instead of going by the subjects, go by the topics.

For example, while studying multivariate calculus you will come across the famous
Stokes’ Theorem but it turns out that there is a high chance that it won’t be of any
immediate use to you in practice and even in reading research papers. So, going by
subject(courses) may be time-consuming and you might get lost in the vast sea of
mathematics.

I recommend that you:

go topic by topic, learn the essential concepts first, consolidate them

And only then go for the other concepts as you encounter them during practical
implementation and reading literature
Here is a list of essential topics in each subject:

Linear Algebra
Vectors
definition, scalars, addition, scalar multiplication, inner product(dot product),
vector projection, cosine similarity, orthogonal vectors, normal and
orthonormal vectors, vector norm, vector space, linear combination, linear
span, linear independence, basis vectors

Matrices
definition, addition, transpose, scalar multiplication, matrix multiplication,
matrix multiplication properties, hadamard product, functions, linear
transformation, determinant, identity matrix, invertible matrix and inverse,
rank, trace, popular type of matrices- symmetric, diagonal, orthogonal,
orthonormal, positive definite matrix

Eigenvalues & eigenvectors

concept, intuition, significance, how to find

Principle component analysis

concept, properties, applications

Singular value decomposition

concept, properties, applications

Calculus
Functions

Scalar derivative
definition, intuition, common rules of differentiation, chain rule, partial
derivatives

Gradient
concept, intuition, properties, directional derivative

Vector and matrix calculus

how to find derivative of {scalar-valued, vector-valued} function wrt a {scalar,
vector} -> four combinations- Jacobian

Gradient algorithms
local/global maxima and minima, saddle point, convex functions, gradient
 descent algorithms- batch, mini-batch, stochastic, their performance
comparison

Probability

Basic rules and axioms

events, sample space, frequentist approach, dependent and independent events,
conditional probability

Random variables- continuous and discrete, expectation, variance,

distributions- joint and conditional

Bayes’ Theorem, MAP, MLE

Popular distributions- binomial, bernoulli, poisson, exponential, gaussian

Conjugate priors

Miscellaneous
Information theory- entropy, cross-entropy, KL divergence, mutual information

Markov Chain- definition, transition matrix, stationarity

What sources to follow?

Any source which suits you, be it a YouTube video or a classical textbook.
If you are unsure, do a simple google search for each topic [<topic name> +
“machine learning”] and read from top links to develop a broad understanding.

The list may seem lengthy but it can save you a lot of time. Reading the above topics
will give you the confidence to dive into the deep world of AI and explore more on
your own.

In case you liked the article, do follow me Abhishek Parbhakar for more articles
related to AI, philosophy, and economics.

Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence Deep Learning Mathematics

 Data Science

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Written by Abhishek Parbhakar

2.1K Followers · Writer for Towards Data Science

Data Scientist • AI Instructor • www.linkedin.com/in/abhishek-parbhakar •

https://topmate.io/abhishek_parbhakar

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