A visual and intuitive introduction to some tricky concepts

Explaining what is going on in a machine learning model can be difficult. There are lots of moving parts and levels of explanation: the maths, the data, the code and the business problem. Usually, it's best to use some visual aids, but building these can take a lot of work. To help with this problem, R2D3 have made a nice visual introduction to machine learning (best viewed on a desktop).

The short tutorial provides an explanation of how a machine learning model works. It explains how you can distinguish between homes in New York and San Fransisco based on data. They start with some descriptive statistics and plots and go on to build a basic tree model. Finally, they discuss some complications like overfitting. This is worth playing with if you are new to the area, and want to understand some basic concepts without needing any coding or maths skills.