Course description:

Machine Learning (ML) is centered around automated methods that improve their own performance through learning patterns in data, and then using the uncovered patterns to predict the future and make decisions. ML is heavily used in a wide variety of domains such as business, finance, healthcare, security, etc. for problems including display advertising, fraud detection, disease diagnosis and treatment, face/speech/handwriting/object recognition, automated navigation, to name a few.

"If I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions." -- Albert Einstein "A problem well put is half solved." -- John Dewey

This course aims to equip students with the practical knowledge and experience of recognizing and formulating machine learning problems in the wild, as well as of applying machine learning techniques effectively in practice. The emphasis will be on learning and practicing the machine learning process, involving the cycle of feature design, modeling, and scaling.

"All models are wrong, but some models are useful." -- George Box

As there exists "no free lunch", we will cover a wide range of different models and learning algorithms, which can be applied to a variety of problems and have varying speed-accuracy-scalability-interpretability tradeoffs. In particular, the topics include generalized linear models, decision trees, Bayesian networks, feature selection, ensemble methods, semi-supervised learning, density estimation, latent factor models, network-based classification, and sequence models.

Course website: http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/lakoglu/courses/95828/index.htm