There are a ton of machine learning utilities out there.  

Which ones should you leverage? What tools could actually be relevant to your project? 

Selecting a tool is a massive deal. The tools that you leverage for machine learning decide the outcomes that you can accomplish. It is crucial that you take the time to select the best utilities that you can for your project. 

In this blog article you will find out a simple strategy that you can leverage to very swiftly identify what tools are out there. 

What is the machine learning tool landscape? 

There are hundreds upon thousands of utilities that you can leverage for machine learning. You are required to be aware of what utilities are out there. You wish to know so that you can select among the best utilities for the one that is correct for your project. 

You could just leverage the first tool you come across on your project. The tool that is presently widespread or being talked about on tech news sites. But how are you aware that it is a good fit? How could the first tool you come across be the correct fit for your project? 

New tools are being put out all the time. In addition to updates and plug-ins to current tools. You do not require to keep updated on all machine learning tool releases, however, it can be valuable if not needed to periodically check in and observe what the landscape appears like. 

Make listings of machine learning tools 

The answer is to develop lists of machine learning tools. 

A list provides you options that you can assess and select from. You can leverage your requirements as search terms to develop the list and you can capture only those salient details about every utility as column headers in your listing. 

After you have the listing of candidate tools, you can look into them further and narrow it down to one or a few utilities that you can actually assess or leverage on your project. 

How to make useful lists quickly 

So how do you develop good lists of machine learning utilities? 

Your listings should be developed quickly. There is no requirement to spend a lot of time developing them. The critical point is that you are performing some research and providing yourself options prior to giving your commitment to a tool that might define the success of your project. 

Quick 5-step process 

Listed is a quick 5-step procedure that you can leverage to swiftly develop useful listings of machine learning tools: 

1. Requirements: Detail the requirements you require for the tool. These will be the search term phrases you will leverage to locate candidate utilities. This might consist of the programming language, features, capabilities, and even interface. The more comprehensive you are with your requirements, the more particular your listing of tools will be. 
2. Features: List out any highly critical features or capacities of a machine learning tool. These will be the column headings that you will capture for every tool. We’d recommend including at least the name of the tool and the URL for the tool’s homepage. 
3. Spreadsheet: Develop a spreadsheet and list out the features as column headings. For instance, you could leverage Microsoft Excel, LibreOffice, or Google Sheets. 
4. Search: Leverage your favourite search engine and search for candidate machine learning tools leveraging your requirements as qualifiers. 
5. List: Inspect every search outcome and capture the candidate tool in your spreadsheet if it is relevant, filling in as many of your features (columns) as you can. 

Tips to develop useful lists quickly 

Listed here are eight tips for making good quality lists. 

• Don’t spend in excess of 10 minutes developing your list. You wish to make sure that you cover the landscape leveraging a broad brush, but you do not want to be exhaustive. 
• Restrict features to between 2 and 5. If you have an excess of features, you might spend too much time hunting for the details to complete in your spreadsheet. The idea is to be swift. A comprehensive investigation can follow later. 
• Do not document duplicates: There’s no necessity to double up. 

• Exclude utilities that are obviously not contenders. This is your list and it is fine to have entry requirements. If you’re concerned about having to re-discover a utility you excluded, list it, but include a column called “First impression” and include an honest entry. 
• Maintain your listing over time: You can retain the listing and invest extra time later to update and include new entries and even attempt new search terms. Listings of candidate tools can beg good when beginning a new project or when you are seeking for new utilities to experiment with. 
• Rank candidate tools as you include them: Don’t be frightened to capture your impression of the utility as you are including it to the list. This can massively speed up the procedure of creating a short listing of utilities to investigate further at a later time. 
• Share your listing: Post it online, on a forum, or on social media. If you found that listing useful, odds are that other individuals found it useful too. 
• Harness other individual’s lists: As you are looking you might find out that other individuals have developed a similar list in the past. Dependent on the date of what the list was developed it might or might not be relevant. It might be helpful to capture these links in a related spreadsheet (or in a new tab of your current spreadsheet) for later reading. 

Ideas for listings of machine learning tools 

Do you like this strategy but you don’t have any notion of what to look for? 

Below are ten instances of listings of machine learning utilities that you could develop. 

• Listings of machine learning platforms with graphical user interfaces 
• List of machine learning as a service APIs 
• List of machine learning as a service website tools 
• List of machine learning libraries for you (your favourite language) 
• List of deep learning libraries for (your favourite language) 
• List of computer vision libraries for (your favourite language) 
• List of natural language processing libraries for (your favourite language)
• List of recommender system libraries for (your favourite language) 
• List of reinforcement learning libraries for (your favourite language) 
• List of rating system libraries for (your favourite language)  

You can make tool lists 

Your list does not require to be exhaustive. As a matter of fact we recommend against developing comprehensive listings of machine learning tools. There is a point of diminishing returns at around 10-to-15 minutes where you begin discovering people’s side projects that are unused, undocumented tools that you likely ought not to be going near. 

You do not require to retain the list. You can discard the list upon creating it and leverage it to develop a short listing or choose a tool. It can be an artifact that assisted you in making a decision. 

You do not require to discard the listing. You might wish to keep your list if your are working on a lot of project and you would wish to update and reevaluate the landscape of utilities often. We find this to be a good strategy. 

You should not spend too long creating the list. Lists of machine learning tools should be developed quickly and put to use selecting a tool so that you can begin with your project. It is a stepping stone to begin your project. Do not let the list become your project. 

You should not have several requirements on the list. Do not over specify your listing of requirements. You might make it too tough to identify any matching utilities. Try to separate desirable features from those attributes of a tool that are absolute necessities. Instances might include function (for example, deep learning algorithms) and programming language (e.g. python) 

The list will save you time. If you must look for tools you will wind up reading a ton of material, retreading ground and not making a decision as you have no way to frame the tools consistently to make a contrast. This simplistic strategy of making a list prior to assessing will save you hours of research and thinking. 

The list will assist you in making improved decisions. You will not leverage the first tool you come across or the first utility recommended to you. You will meticulously consider your project requirements and at least consider more than a single option. 

Conclusion 

In this blog article, you found out a simple strategy that you can leverage to discover the landscape of machine learning tools that you could leverage for your project within minutes. 

A swift 5-step process was recommended to develop your list. 

1. List tool requirements to leverage as search terms 
2. List tool features you can leverage as column headers 
3. Create a spreadsheet with column headers 
4. Search leveraging tool requirements 
5. Include entries to your list from search outcomes.