Virgilio Data Science

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Virgilio GitHub stars

Your new Mentor for Data Science E-Learning.

Virgilio is an open-source initiative, aiming to mentor and guide anyone in the world of Data Science.

The Vision of Virgilio is to give everyone the chance to get involved in this field, get self-started as a practitioner, gain new skills and learn to navigate through the infinite web of available resources and find the ones useful for you.

Virgilio comes in form of Guides and it's organized in three levels to offer you a clear learning path:

  • Paradiso: High Level Guides - For Everyone
  • Purgatorio: Entry Level Technical Guides - For Beginners
  • Inferno: Advanced Technical Guide - For Experienced Practitioners

TIP

If you want to contribute to the Virgilio, welcome! 😃 You will find information about contribution guidelines in the Contribute section.

# Table of Contents

# What is Virgilio?

Studying and reading through the Internet means swimming in an infinite jungle of chaotic information, even more so in rapidly changing innovative fields.

Have you ever felt overwhelmed when trying to approach Data Science without a real “path” to follow?

Are you tired of clicking “Run”, “Run”, “Run”.. on a Jupyter Notebook, with that false sense of confidence given by the comfort zone of the work of others?

Have you ever got confused because of the several and contradicting names for the same algorithm or approach, from different websites and fragmented tutorials?

Virgilio addresses these critical issues for free, for everyone.

Hi, I'm Virgilio (opens new window).

Like I did with Dante (opens new window), just some centuries ago, I'll be your mentor and reference point during your journey through this selva oscura, providing you complete and organic learning paths for several data-related fields, tools, skills and more.

The vision of Virgilio is to give everyone the possibility to get into the world of Data Science and Machine Learning and the business and creative possibilities that they offer, to get self-started as a practitioner, gain new cutting edge practical skills, or just learn to discriminate good information from poor information.

Virgilio is doing this by providing only high-quality and coherent content, with clear step-by-step paths and a consistent naming system.

Imagine Virgilio as your E-Mentor, who will tell you what to do to get the next step, the next skill, or to apply them in practice to create value!

But what does it mean in practice?

In other words, who is the target of the Virgilio project?

Depending on your background and interests, you may be:

  • A student from a different field who wants to explore the intersections and the possibilities offered by Machine Learning and Statistical Methods.
  • A curious individual who came in touch with one of the buzzwords related to these fields and wants to discriminate between reliable and unreliable information.
  • An experienced practitioner who wants to have a reference point for the latest techniques, papers, and best practices.
  • A manager who wants to understand the possibilities of ML applied to their actual problems, like integration with production systems or new solutions from scratch.
  • A businessman who wants to understand if his data are suitable for an ML project, and what could be the real business value.
  • A salesman who needs to stay up-to-date with the latest technologies and Jargon.

For all of these scenarios, Virgilio gives you the resources and the guidance that you need!

# Structure

Figure 1

As you can imagine it’s not easy to intercept all these different needs, but Virgilio solves this problem with a hierarchical project structure that distinguishes the content based on different levels of abstraction.

The inspiration for this organization comes from Dante’s amazing masterpiece La Divina Commedia (opens new window), written in over 20 years of work and published for the first time in 1323 AD.

In his journey, Dante travel across the three different levels of the catholic conception of the divine universe at that time, exploring the Inferno (the prison of the damned), passing through the Purgatorio and reaching the Paradiso (you can call it Valhalla or Nirvana, as you prefer 😃 ).

So, who is Virgilio?

Dante's journey wouldn’t have been possible without his guide Virgilio, a roman famous poet (70 a.c.) who inspired generations of artists since the Roman hegemony in Europe.

In your journey, you will start from scratch and eventually reach the theoretical knowledge and solid expendable skill.

The parallelism is natural:

  • Paradiso: High Level Guides - For Everyone
  • Purgatorio: Entry Level Technical Guides - For Beginners
  • Inferno: Advanced Technical Guide - For Experienced Practitioners

Going from Paradiso to Inferno increases the level of detail of the guides and decreases the level of abstraction of the topics involved.

In the Paradiso you won’t find a single line of code or a math formula, just plain English. Here’s the place for introductions, simple explanations, demystifications, and meta-guides (for example a guide about the best way to use Virgilio).

It’s the best place for the not-techies, beginners, and literally everyone who wants to get in touch with Data Science and Machine Learning without getting bored with technical details.

Do you want to be able to understand and talk about these innovative fields?

Start from the Paradiso!

In the Purgatorio you can find technical guides for beginners (in the field or in general IT).

For example, you’ll find guides about Python, maths, statistical modeling, building production-ready Machine Learning systems, and more.

The whole Purgatorio's structure is built on the end-to-end Data Science process, where each section corresponds to a macro-phase of the Data Science process: It’s an obliged step before the Inferno.

Depending on your starting skill, you’ll probably spend here most of the time, learning to code, understand math concepts, and more!

If you’re a complete beginner, follow the track we proposed, starting from the Fundamentals.

In the Inferno you won’t find gentle introductions or generic explanations, but a lot of different detailed guides, topics, hands-on tutorials and more!

Think about Inferno as the place where you will pick up the sub-field you prefer and dive into that.

The three "deep-dive" guides in the Inferno are:

  • Time Series
  • Natural Language
  • Computer Vision

These learning paths are the “final bosses” of the Virgilio project: once you’ll have completed them you will hopefully be skilled enough to land an internship or tackle real business problems!

Above these, in the Inferno you’ll find a plenty of other useful zones:

  • Tools: here you find guides about useful tools for programming, or scientific computing in general.
  • Research: here you will learn how to find the right papers and digest them. In addition, you’ll discover which teams to follow for your interests.
  • ML for Business applications: here we provide additional resources to select a sector and see what are today’s available techniques for the problems of your interest.

# About

Virgilio is developed and maintained by these awesome people. You can email us virgilio.datascience (at) gmail.com or join the Discord chat (opens new window).

# Contribute

That's awesome! Check the contribution guidelines and get involved in our project!

# License

Contents are released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license (opens new window). Code is released under the MIT license (opens new window).

Demystification of the key concepts of AI and ML →