Data Science Learning Roadmap
Prerequisites or Foundational
1. Linear Algebra
Vectors & vector operations
Matrices & matrix operations (addition, multiplication)
Matrix inverses & determinants
Dot product & cross product
Eigenvalues & eigenvectors
Singular Value Decomposition (SVD)
Principal Component Analysis (PCA)
2. Probability & Statistics
Probability
Basic probability rules
Bayes’ Theorem
Probability distributions (Gaussian, Binomial, Poisson, Exponential)
Joint, marginal, and conditional probability
Expectation & variance
Statistics
Descriptive statistics (mean, median, mode, variance, skewness)
Hypothesis testing (p-value, t-test, chi-square test)
Confidence intervals
Central Limit Theorem
Correlation & covariance
3. Calculus
Derivatives (basic rules, chain rule)
Partial derivatives
Gradients & directional derivatives
Optimization (minima/maxima)
Integrals (basic, definite/indefinite)
Multivariable calculus (Jacobian, Hessian)
4. Optimization
Gradient descent (batch, stochastic, mini-batch)
Convex vs. non-convex functions
Lagrange multipliers (constrained optimization)
Loss functions (MSE, cross-entropy)
Core Data Science Skills
1. Data Wrangling & Cleaning
Handling missing data, outliers, duplicates
Data transformation (Pandas, OpenRefine)
2. Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA)
Descriptive statistics
Data visualization (Matplotlib, Seaborn, Plotly)
3. Machine Learning (ML)
Supervised Learning:
o Regression (Linear, Logistic, Polynomial)
o Classification (Decision Trees, SVM, k-NN)
Unsupervised Learning:
o Clustering (k-Means, Hierarchical)
o Dimensionality Reduction (PCA, t-SNE)
Model Evaluation (Accuracy, Precision, Recall, ROC-AUC)
Ensemble Methods (Random Forest, XGBoost)
4. Deep Learning
Neural Networks (ANN, CNN, RNN)
Frameworks: TensorFlow, PyTorch, Keras
Advanced Topics & Specializations
1. Natural Language Processing (NLP)
2. Computer Vision (CV)
3. Time Series Analysis
4. Reinforcement Learning (RL)
Deployment & Real-World Applications
1. Model Deployment
Flask / FastAPI for APIs
Docker & Kubernetes for containerization
Cloud platforms (AWS SageMaker, GCP, Azure ML)
2. MLOps (Machine Learning Operations)
CI/CD for ML models
Model monitoring (MLflow, Kubeflow)