Andrew Ng

Abu Mostafa’s Machine Learning MOOC – Now on EdX

Anirudh Technical , , , , , , , ,

This was in the pipeline for quite some time now. I have been waiting for his lectures on a platform such as EdX or Coursera, and the day has arrived. You can enroll and start with week 1’s lectures as they’re live now.

This course is taught by none other than Dr. Yaser S. Abu – Mostafa, whose textbook on machine learning, Learning from Data is #1 bestseller textbook (Amazon) in all categories of Computer Science. His online course has been offered earlier over here.

Teaching

Dr. Abu-Mostafa received the Clauser Prize for the most original doctoral thesis at Caltech. He received the ASCIT Teaching Awards in 1986, 1989 and 1991, the GSC Teaching Awards in 1995 and 2002, and the Richard P. Feynman prize for excellence in teaching in 1996.

Live ‘One-take’ Recordings

The lectures have been recorded from a live broadcast (including Q&A, which will let you gauge the level of CalTech students taking this course). In fact, it almost seems as though Abu Mostafa takes a direct jab at Andrew Ng’s popular Coursera MOOC by stating the obvious on his course page.

A real Caltech course, not a watered-down version

screenshot-www-work-caltech-edu-2016-09-24-22-19-21

Again, while enrolling note that this is what Abu Mostafa had to say about the online course:  “A Caltech course does not cater to short attention spans, and it may not provide instant gratification…[like] many MOOCs out there that are quite simple and have a ‘video game’ feel to them.” Unsurprisingly, many online students have dropped out in the past, but some of those students who “complained early on but decided to stick with the course had very flattering words to say at the end”.

Prerequisites

  • Basic probability
  • Basic matrices
  • Basic calculus
  • Some programming language/platform (I choose Python!)

If you’re looking for a challenging machine learning course, this is probably one you must take.

 

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MITx 15.071x (Analytics Edge) – 2016

Anirudh Non Technical , , , , , ,

I am auditing this course currently and just completed its 2nd assignment. It’s probably one of the best courses out there to learn R in a way that you go beyond the syntax with an objective in mind – to do analytics and run machine learning algorithms to derive insight from data. This course is different from machine learning courses by say, Andrew Ng in that this course won’t focus on coding the algorithm and rather would emphasize on diving right into the implementation of those algorithms using libraries that the R programming language already equips us with.

Take a look at the course logistics. And hey, they’ve got a Kaggle competition!

AnalyticsEdgeLogistics

There’s still time to enroll and grab a certificate (or simply audit). The course is offered once a year. I met a bunch of people who did well at a data hackathon I had gone to recently, who had learned the ropes in data science thanks to Analytics Edge.

Supplementary Material to Andrew Ng’s Machine Learning MOOC

Anirudh Technical , ,

Although the lecture videos and lecture notes from Andrew Ng‘s Coursera MOOC are sufficient for the online version of the course, if you’re interested in more mathematical stuff or want to be challenged further, you can go through the following notes and problem sets from CS 229, a 10-week course that he teaches at Stanford (which also happens to be the most enrolled course on campus). It’s not hard to end up with a 100% score on his MOOC which is obviously a (much) watered down version of the course he teaches at Stanford, at least in terms of difficulty. If you don’t believe me, just have a go at the problem sets from the links below.

Lecture Notes

Section Notes

Handouts and Problem Sets

Solutions to Machine Learning Programming Assignments

Anirudh Technical , , , , , ,

This post contains links to a bunch of code that I have written to complete Andrew Ng’s famous machine learning course which includes several interesting machine learning problems that needed to be solved using the Octave / Matlab programming language. I’m not sure I’d ever be programming in Octave after this course, but learning Octave just so that I could complete this course seemed worth the time and effort. I would usually work on the programming assignments on Sundays and spend several hours coding in Octave, telling myself that I would later replicate the exercises in Python.

If you’ve taken this course and found some of the assignments hard to complete, I think it might not hurt to go check online on how a particular function was implemented. If you end up copying the entire code, it’s probably your loss in the long run. But then John Maynard Keynes once said, ‘In the long run we are all dead‘. Yeah, and we wonder why people call Economics the dismal science!

Most people disregard Coursera’s feeble attempt at reigning in plagiarism by creating an Honor Code, precisely because this so-called code-of-conduct can be easily circumvented. I don’t mind posting solutions to a course’s programming assignments because GitHub is full to the brim with such content. Plus, it’s always good to read others’ code even if you implemented a function correctly. It helps understand the different ways of tackling a given programming problem.

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Enjoy!