Factually speaking , when you know the skills well enough, no certification is really necessary. But for a beginner, it is a catch-22. No experience without an on-job learning and no job without learned skills! So certifications are the bridge to some sort of assurance of training of requisite skills. Having said that, you can find lots of machine learning courses from free online to highly expensive multi year online or classroom courses. But what matters is how you master to apply those skills and demonstrate that in some form of portfolio or platform like kaggle.com, hackerearth, having GitHub repositories and sizeable forks, open competitions leaderboards etc.
Well there are tool based Machine Learning certification but i don’t think there are any purely based upon machine learning. Machine Learning is the algorithm part but on what you run the algorithm depends upon you. You may use Octave, Matlab, SAS, R, Python, etc. but the end inference that you want to make remains the same.
But, you can find a Machine Learning course on Coursera by Ng Andrews which is provided by Stanford University, here after the course completion you’ll get a certificate and you are tested at each and every topic that you go thrpugh and based upon the completion and the final score that you get due course of the course you’ll be awarded the certificate. This course does add value to you and at the same time also gives you a good understanding of the mathematics behind all the algorithms that you come up with.
Disclaimer: Ng Andrews takes you through the coarse using Octave, which is a good tool to test your algorithm on before making it go live on your project.
All the best.
Hope this helps!
