All lecture notes and course information are now hosted on Google group 18799-F09
Statistical Discovery and Learning studies the question "how can we build computer programs that automatically improve their performance through experience?" This includes learning to perform many types of tasks based on many types of experience. For example, it includes robots learning to better navigate based on experience gained by roaming their environments, medical decision aids that learn to predict which therapies work best for which diseases based on data mining of historical health records, and speech recognition systems that lean to better understand your speech based on experience listening to you. This course is designed to give students a thorough grounding in the methods, theory, mathematics and algorithms needed to do research and applications in machine learning. The topics of the course draw from machine learning, classical statistics, data mining, Bayesian statistics and information theory and other areas.
This course is project-oriented and is intended to give students abundant hands-on experience with different machine learning algorithms. Students who have already taken CS 10-701/15-781 Machine Learning should not take this course.
The contents of the course, including the Course Schedule, Grading Policy, and Late Homework Policy, are subject to change.
Joy Ying Zhang (joy+@cs.cmu.edu) and Ole J. Mengshoel (ole.mengshoel@sv.cmu.edu)
Guest instructors: Jason Lohn (Jason.lohn@sv.cmu.edu), Abe Ishihara (abe.ishihara@sv.cmu.edu)
Students entering the class with a pre-existing working knowledge of probability, statistics and algorithms will be at an advantage, but the class has been designed so that anyone with maturity in mathematics and computer science can catch up and fully participate.
Course projects require students to have programming skills in either C/C++, Java or a similar programming languages.
The midterm and final exams will be open book and open notes. Computers will not be allowed.
Homeworks and exams may contain material that has been covered by papers and webpages. Since this is a graduate class, we expect students to want to learn and not google for answers.
Homeworks will be done individually: each student must hand in their own answers and implementations. It is acceptable, however, for students to collaborate in figuring out answers and helping each other solve the problems. We will be assuming that, as participants in a graduate course, you will be taking the responsibility to make sure you personally understand the solution to any work arising from such collaboration. You also must indicate on each homework with whom you collaborated.
The final project is to be completed by small teams (2 to 3 students).
* Sign up project
Students are expected to form small teams to work on one of the final course projects proposed by faculty members using techniques covered in this course or closely related techniques. At the end of the project, each team needs to write a final project report in the style of a conference paper.