Spring 2020
Prof. Biplab Banerjee
Author: Nakul Randad
Pre-requisite courses: None
Pre-requisite skills: Basic programming proficiency in Python/Julia saves the struggle during assignments. The following prerequisites were preferable but not mandatory: Linear Algebra, Basic Multivariable Calculus and Probability.
Course Content:
- Regression
- Classification
- Clustering
- Probabilistic methods
- SVMs
- Dimensionality Reduction
- Selected topics in Neural Networks (CNN, RNN etc)
Motivation to take up the course: This course gives a basic introduction to Machine Learning which includes Supervised-Unsupervised Learning, Feature Recognition, Dimensionality Reduction, Neural Networks etc.
Information about Projects/Assignments:
Coding Assignments (Individual): Application of known algorithms covered in lectures. They were fairly straight forward and took around 4-5 hours to complete. These assignments helped in understanding the implementation of the theory taught in class.
Course Project (Group): Students were required to implement a research paper of their choice and demonstrate the results in the final presentation.
Quizzes/Midsem/Endsem papers Difficulty: 3/5
Overall Course Difficulty: Moderate
Average Time Commitment: (Apart from lectures and tutorials) Between 3-6 hrs
Attendance Policy: 75% attendance was mandatory, below which there was some penalty
General funda: Going through the slides and practising a few problems suffices for the exams. Exams are more of understanding based with a bit of maths here and there
Grading stats: Check ASC.
Professor’s Teaching Style: The professor taught all theory in class with the help of slides. The pace of the lectures was quite slow, hence they were easy to follow and understand. A few tutorials were arranged wherein TAs explained the actual code implementing algorithms.
Should you do this course?: If you are interested in doing ML or wish to have a sneek-peek at it then this course is a good place to start. If you have already taken any other ML introductory course then I won’t recommend you take this course as you won’t learn anything new.