Learning From Data (Introductory Machine Learning)

This introductory computer science course in machine learning will cover basic theory, algorithms, and applications. Machine learning is a key technology in Big Data, and in many financial, medical, commercial, and scientific applications. It enables computational systems to automatically learn how to perform a desired task based on information extracted from the data. Machine learning has become one of the hottest fields of study today and the demand for jobs is only expected to increase. Gaining skills in this field will get you one step closer to becoming a data scientist or quantitative analyst.

This course balances theory and practice, and covers the mathematical as well as the heuristic aspects. The lectures follow each other in a story-like fashion:

• What is learning?
• Can a machine learn?
• How to do it?
• How to do it well?
• Take-home lessons.

The topics in the story line are covered by 18 lectures of about 60 minutes each plus Q&A.

• Lecture 1: The Learning Problem
• Lecture 2: Is Learning Feasible?
• Lecture 3: The Linear Model I
• Lecture 4: Error and Noise
• Lecture 5: Training versus Testing
• Lecture 6: Theory of Generalization
• Lecture 7: The VC Dimension
• Lecture 8: Bias-Variance Tradeoff
• Lecture 9: The Linear Model II
• Lecture 10: Neural Networks
• Lecture 11: Overfitting
• Lecture 12: Regularization
• Lecture 13: Validation
• Lecture 14: Support Vector Machines
• Lecture 15: Kernel Methods
• Lecture 16: Radial Basis Functions
• Lecture 17: Three Learning Principles
• Lecture 18: Epilogue