[dataguy]

You think so? Well okay, it's not a topic for everybody, but with increasing data loads, it's about time people think more about machine learning technologies to use to get to know more about their data. I do both Operations Research and Machine Learning and see many possibilities to improve a company's knowledge about the data they have - even if they don't know it (yet).

Especially as with unsupervised ML you can definitely find patterns in your data, groups of similar data and trends, you can do forecasts, imply relationships, and much more.

It's a hard topic, and you definitely need a lot of time to get into the really bloody details, but it is definitely worth it. And it makes a lot of fun if you like maths and statistics.

[cageface]

I agree it's a fascinating field. I've been doing nothing for the past few months but intensive study of the fundamentals. I've had to review a lot of math but I've really been enjoying it. It also seems reasonable to me to expect that demand for those skills will grow.

My impression of the current job market, however, is that it's tough for somebody without formal academic qualifications to crack.

[dataguy]

There I agree, without the academic qualifications, people will hardly listen to you talking about formal Hilbert spaces, Jaccard index, etc.