Understanding how the techniques work and how they relate to outcomes on a particular kind of problem. That would help me understood where a particular technique can be applied for what particular problems. With that knowledge, I could hire someone to do the machine learning coding if and only if I could expect it to be worth our while. Actually doing the coding could be automated soon enough. There is already visual programming for machine learning. And I reckon the cohort of people doing machine learning are more likely to be skilled in automating programming procedures than computer scientists on average. So, I do not expect it worthwhile to learn the nitty gritty of data-science in depth, but rather the concepts in breadth.
This thread is for asking any questions that might seem obvious, tangential, silly or what-have-you. Don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better.
Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.
To any future monthly posters of SQ threads, please remember to add the "stupid_questions" tag.