How Machine Learning leverages Linear Algebra to Solve Data Problems

Why you should learn the fundamentals of linear algebra

Harshit Tyagi
7 min readSep 2, 2021

Machines or your computers only understand numbers and these numbers need to be represented and processed in a way that enables these machines to solve problems by learning from data instead of predefined instruction as in the case of programming.

All types of programming use mathematics at some level and machine learning is programming data to learn the function that best describes the data.

The problem(or process) of finding the best parameters of a function using data is called model training in ML.

Therefore, in a nutshell, machine learning is programming to optimize for the best possible solution and we need math to understand how that problem is solved.

The first step towards learning Math for ML is Linear algebra.

Linear Algebra is that mathematical foundation that solves the problem of representing data as well as computations in machine learning models.

It is the math of arrays — technically referred to as vectors, matrices, and tensors.

Common Areas of Application — Linear Algebra in Action

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Harshit Tyagi

Director Data Science & ML at Scaler | LinkedIn's Bestselling Instructor | YouTuber