<h3>Context</h3>
<p>The duplicate question states, &quot;I don't have enough knowledge to understand [<em>Elements of Statistical Learning</em>]&quot; and asks (therefore) for more suitable introductions.</p>
<p>The closed question does not have such a clear focus.  Its title, &quot;How to get an introductory understanding of Machine Learning,&quot; appears to duplicate the former one.  Its text asks something different, phrased as three questions.  They all are variants of &quot;Is a strong background in maths a total requisite for ML?&quot;</p>
<p>I interpreted these two as broadly asking the same thing: references to resources for learning about ML for people without the requisite background.</p>
<h3>About Duplicates</h3>
<p>&quot;Duplicate&quot; questions are not supposed to be <em>exact</em> duplicates of each other, but only duplicates of the <em>content</em>: &quot;This question covers exactly the same content as earlier questions on this topic.&quot;  As far as I can tell, the two questions we are discussing are duplicates in this sense.</p>
<p>Closing a question as a duplicate is good for <em>everybody</em>:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>It keeps topics clearly organized.</p>
</li>
<li><p>It enhances searching.</p>
</li>
<li><p>It speeds up finding answers by limiting the places one has to look.</p>
</li>
<li><p>It consolidates closely related material.</p>
</li>
<li><p>The person asking the question <em>immediately</em> gets answers--usually with votes and comments to help evaluate their quality or usefulness.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>One motivation to keep a question open might be to help its respondents continue to accumulate reputation for their replies.  This can just as well be accomplished by merging the threads.  Merging, however, is more difficult to undo than closing (I am not aware of any way to completely reverse a merge) and can be performed only by moderators.  Therefore it seems wise to delay merges in any case where two questions are not clearly <em>exactly</em> the same.</p>
<h3>Resolutions</h3>
<p>If this question is re-opened, I recommend it should be done so only if accompanied by edits to give it a clear focus.  Depending on those edits, it perhaps also ought to be made CW, because this is one of those peripheral, possibly useful, topics that are not likely to have any objectively correct or best answer.</p>
