Course selection, Machinelearning vs Big Data

[Aber]

Hi. For my next semester I am considering a big data course or a machinelearning course.
Which course is better than the other for a guy who wants to be a quant?
I am a graduate math finance student. Quant jobs is interest me but I haven't really thought about which areas etc to work.

 

[Aber]

... I know big data is good to know when working in finance. But what about machine learning?

 

[ibpkpnu]

These sound like almost the same course. Can you provide more specific information (e.g. from the syllabus) of each course?

 

[Aber]

These sound like almost the same course. Can you provide more specific information (e.g. from the syllabus) of each course?

I haven't selected any specific course. I am still waiting to get information about where I will be next year (I have applied exchange for several schools and I don't know where I will be accepted)
I was just wondering how the tools used in those areas could fit in a quant profile in general

 

[yetanotherquant]

Strictly speaking, big data is a very special use case: the data that you cannot put on your (conventional) HDD, i.e [currently] >10 Tb can be considered as big.

Hadoop takes care about storing you big data in cluster, consiting of (conventinal) hardware notes, IMO for a Data Analyst it is not a must to understand how HDFS technicall works.

What is, however, a must is to understand the MapReduce.
To put it simply: we need to count a number of books in the library, I count the on even shelves, you count on the odd shelves. Finally, we add our partial sums.

So essentially, HDFS + MapReduce = Big Data.
But to make use of them you need machine learning algos, and namely those, that can be reduced to MapReduce.