It's been interesting to watch the competition between Python and R over the past few years to be the numero uno language for machine learning. In my opinion, you should learn both. I use Python for NLP and R for machine learning, although sometimes I do a little NLP in R and a little machine learning in Python. It's basically a Toyota v. Honda debate. They're both great. The latest (2017) survey from Kaggle shows where we are: Python is the most used tool but statisticians prefer R for their ML work. Titles vary by country for these professionals, but the most common is Data Scientist. The majority of survey participants have a Master's or PhD degree. The top four algorithms were: logistic regression, decision trees, random forests, and neural networks. Why do I teach machine learning with R? The main thing I like about R for beginning machine learning aficionados is that it gets out of the way. The syntax is straightforward enough that you can focus o...
