Earlier this year, I started my master’s program at Georgia Tech. However, in my first semester, I faced various difficulties in my personal, professional and academic life. I also enjoyed the semester going to Orissa (Bhubaneswar and Puri), which disrupted my study schedule a bit, but the advance planning helped. Despite this, I was able to perform well. I especially enjoyed ML4T as my first course. I chose it based on reviews from OMSCS Central and my area of expertise. Registration day was like a quick and exciting flash sale on Amazon, with every seat booked within a minute of him.
ML4T is a great introductory course for learning finance and machine learning concepts. Since I already knew these concepts, the course only took about 5-7 hours a week, except for the last few weeks of projects. You learned how to create decision trees and bag learners from scratch using numpy. This was a great hands-on experience. The course also covered Reinforcement Learning and Q-Learning and allowed me to create a Q-Learning model from scratch for my trading use case. This was a valuable learning experience.
In this course, I learned not only machine learning, but also financial concepts that made me a better investor. We have learned that even choosing a server location can be an important decision for a high frequency trading firm.
Learning about amazing financial concepts has certainly improved my investment thought process. Now you know what Alpha, Beta, Sharpe Ratio and Fund Volatility mean. I learned to value stocks based on fundamental and technical analysis.
We also learned about the Efficient Frontier Portfolio. This is a risk versus return plot that helps identify the best option with minimum risk and maximum return. I gained knowledge about mean variance optimization, which combines stocks that are negatively correlated in the short term and positively correlated in the long term.
They also explained options trading and income statements. I also learned about optional strategies such as the Covered Call and the ButterFly technique. The EMH and CAPM concepts were very valuable.
In total, the course consisted of 2 exams and 8 projects. OMSCentral currently rates this course at 2.5 for him and a workload of around 11.2 hours. However, the time required to complete the course was much less, typically studying about 5-7 hours per week. I often finished work on weekends. This course includes how to write a report, so please try to write efficiently. However, the report is not very long.
Overall, I highly recommend this course as an OMSCS starter.
Fun Sharing: From Orissa Travel
When I shared an interesting photo I took, I found the original photo for Rs. 10 INR Currency (Sun Temple Konark).
I’m honing my superhero problem-solving skills. If you need a data scientist to save your day with an advice or consulting job, you know where to find me! Let the magic happen!
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