As others have said, you need to at least get the gist of what&#x27;s going on mathematically to be able to make sensible decisions about model selection, structure, etc.<p>That said, I find a lot of the introductions to the theory behind ML techniques to be very poorly written. It&#x27;s often worth giving a new student a conceptual simplification before introducing a rigorous definition.<p>Without linear algebra and basic probability&#x2F;calculus though, forget it. Luckily there&#x27;s great sources to brush up on it.