Machine learning in finance

I’ve been interested in machine learning now a days. It fascinates me.

I think some of the best careers right now are in medicine, finance and technology. And if I break finance more the most careers in finance are analytical type jobs like market research analyst and best kind of tech jobs are like machine learning and data scientist.

Both data science and machine learning(ML) require programming knowledge and can be used together to help each other. Python seems to be an industry favorite as the programming language to do both of them. The best thing about Python is its easy but is as useful as anything else.

So, what is machine learning? Machine learning is to let computer systems learn from its environment and experiences without any prior explicit programming. That’s an over simplified answer but I guess it’s enough for the discussions here.

Self-driving cars, speech recognition, image recognition etc. are fruits of machine learning. Machine learning let’s machines achieve human level expertness in various jobs. Impressive huh! In some fields machines are even beating humans now ( which is a little scary I guess).

Current usage of ML in finance are

Algorithmic trading, portfolio management, fraud detection etc.

Potential fields for machine learning in finance are

Planning, budgeting and forecasting, operational accounting, inter-company transactions, financial reporting, sentiment analysis etc.

Machine learning can free up time for the people in finance department so they can contribute more in strategic decision making.

If anyone is interested to check machine learning out I’d recommend two sources:

1. Machine learning courses at Udacity (are fun to watch)
2. And a YouTube channel called sentdex

If you have any query please comment. Also I’d love to hear suggestions about courses to take my knowledge further, as I’m new to the programming world.