Amazon's ML University is opening it's exclusive courses for free to the world!

Amazon just did something amazing that is quite dear to my heart. They are going to open up their ML/AI courses - which used to be available only to its employees - to the entire world! This is going to be such an exciting offering that I can't wait to lay my hands (and eyes) on these courses. The reason is that I'll always put a practical premium on courses offered by companies such as Amazon over courses offered by University professors from Stanford. This is because machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) are largely still growing fields and companies like Amazon have spent a lot of time and resources figuring out what works and what doesn't.

Amazon released just 3 courses for now - Natural Language processing, Computer Vision and Tabular Data. It promises to release other courses in 2021. I'll spend the rest of this article motivating why you should take the deep dive and begin to learn these 3 courses as it relates to AI and Finance. This will be very much in line with my latest article on Stock Market Trading with ML/AI.

Natural Language Processing (NLP):

This will be the future of stock trading as one can easily use ML/AI to read company publications, reports and general news and sentiment analysis in a matter of seconds or minutes. Doing this work manually will take a human analyst at least months to accomplish. The productivity enhancement to trading using NLP in the years to come will be unparalleled compared to any other ML/AI technology.

Computer Vision (CV):

CV is probably one of the most mature ML/AI technologies at the moment. It's been used successfully to identify images such as "cats" from the internet. However, using CV for finance is a relatively nascent undertaking. It is currently being used by financial analysts to analyze businesses from satellite images from google. Consider for example an analyst in China trying to determine if Walmart will achieve outstanding sales during the holidays. Waiting for Walmart to report this result will lead to a significant lost opportunity - a lagging indicator - but analyzing the density of cars in Walmart's parking lot before and during the holiday's will give rise to the leading indicator the analyst needs to make a profit from the trade.

Tabular Data:

Don't let the title of this course fool you but it can easily be called an introduction to ML/AI. It contains most of the introductory topics in ML/AI and I'll advise it be the first course you take if you plan to take advantage of Amazon's generosity in making these courses available online. It has topics such as K-nearest neighbors and decision tree learning. Each of these ML/AI algorithms can be used to trade the stock market surprisingly quite efficiently and I will be describing such use in the continuation of the series Stock Market Trading with ML/AI.

My goal with this article was to motivate you, my ardent reader, to spend the time and dive in into Amazon ML University's free ML/AI course offerings as you prepare to join me in the journey of a lifetime to learn how to trade the markets with ML/AI.

Yours in learning!