4 of the Best Data Science YouTube Channels

There are a lot of ways that you can learn about data science and/or stay up to date with the latest trends, but the easiest by far is still Youtube. You could do a search for data science and come up with thousands and thousands of hits, but we’ve got our top four picks to help you get started. Let’s take a look.

Siraj Raval — Best For Exposure

Siraj takes a lot of flack for claiming to be for beginners and then steamrolling you with a bunch of high-level information (and so much handwaving), but we find his videos useful for the simple reason that exposure to a concept is the first step in self-learning. He has an extensive library of videos ranging from live streams dedicated to specific ideas ranging to AI videos and overviews of algorithms and coding concepts.

Watch these if you don’t know what you don’t know and get a sense of what concepts need to be on your horizon for learning. Don’t expect to understand everything that he’s talking about (you’d need a fairly comprehensive data science background to follow along completely) but keep a running list of concepts to look up later.

Where to start: Avoid any videos that include the formula “X in Y minutes” and go straight for his Intro to Deep Learning stuff.

Kevin Markham Data School — Best For Practical Instruction

Kevin Markham is the founder of Data School and uses his YouTube channel to offer practical instruction. He focuses on topics students should learn first, breaking things down into simple tracks for both beginning and advanced students.

One of the most valuable features of his channel is answering questions like “Should I Learn Pandas Before SciKit-Learn?” giving you real-world advice and not just a maze of tutorials. And there are tutorials as well…lots of them. It’s practical, and a little less dry than some other tutorial-style videos.

Where to start: If you’re a beginner, go for some of the FAQ style videos. If you’re more advanced, delve into more hands-on videos.

Google Cloud Platform — Best For Keeping Up With Trends

Google’s reach is just about infinite, and their Youtube channel is full of tutorials to help you build not just what’s happening now but what’s happening next. This channel has a broad ecosystem for both data scientists and developers with plenty of crossover videos in multiple languages. They’re continually producing new content and have a deep backlog of videos if you’re just getting started.

The focus is mostly on building and innovation using Google’s engineers to drive learning sets. Simple searches turn up videos ranging from deconstructing chatbots to building collaborative big data. This is a great place to get lost and subscribe knowing there’s always going to be new material to greet you.

Where to start: Do a search for your particular interest and follow the rabbit hole.

Open Data Science — Best For Broad Spectrum Knowledge

We have a YouTube channel where you can get not only tutorials in a wide range of disciplines and ability levels but all of the coolest presentations from our conferences. Where else can you find R tutorials, NLP, and data storytelling all in one place? It’s built not just for developers, but data visualizers, machine learning enthusiasts, and business owners looking to finally figure out what their data analytics team is talking about.

We update our materials regularly, so be sure to check out our channel for open source data science tools and access to our community frequently.

Where to start: Start with our latest upload or give our conference videos some love.

Best Data Science Channels

This is always evolving as big data transforms our world in almost every way we could imagine. It’s important to remember that different channels have different purposes and you may grow out of certain ones as your knowledge increases. Always keep a few options in your back pocket so you can stay fresh with what’s going on in data science and how it’s evolving.

Want more video content? Check out ODSC’s AI Learning Accelerator for more videos on data science, AI, and more — for free!

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