Which machine learning model should you try first?

Recently, I received an email from an aspiring data scientist asking a common question in data science. How do I know when to use which model? The data scientist that sent the question provided more context and had a good approach in mind, but I’d like to answer this question for everyone just starting out in data science.

How do I know when to use which machine learning model?

This is one of those it depends on everything questions; but here is my approach strongly rooted in the…