Insight. Applied.
Andy Kirk at Visualising Data ran a Twitter poll about the relative accessibility of R and Python to non-developers.
59% said that R was more accessible.
Obviously, the poll is far from scientific, but the comments he received reflect my own experiences of teaching both languages—such as the significance of the RStudio IDE and the tidyverse packages in getting people off the ground.
Wale Akinfaderin, a research scientist intern at IBM Research, has written an article on the mathematical background required to fully understand machine learning.
He includes a list of educational resources for those who wish to brush up in certain areas.
Wale correctly stresses that you don’t need this level of knowledge to start making use of machine learning. There are many packaged solutions. However, if you wish to master the topic, some mathematical prowess is inescapable.