Instructor:  Milos Hauskrecht
Computer Science Department
5329 Sennott Square
phone: x4-8845
e-mail: milos at cs pitt edu
office hours: Thursday 1:00-3:00pm

TA:  Zitao Liu
Computer Science Department
5324 Sennot Square
phone:
e-mail: ztliu at cs pitt edu
office hours: Tuesday 1:30-4:30pm

• Course syllabus
• Matlab tutorial
• Homework 4 is out and due on February 15, 2012 before the class. Data and programs for the assignment are here . The report should be handed in at the beginning of the lecture.

Course description
Lectures
Homeworks
Term projects
Matlab

The goal of the field of machine learning is to build computer systems that learn from experience and that are capable to adapt to their environments. Learning techniques and methods developed by researchers in this field have been successfully applied to a variety of learning tasks in a broad range of areas, including, for example, text classification, gene discovery, financial forecasting, credit card fraud detection, collaborative filtering, design of adaptive web agents and others.

This introductory machine learning course will give an overview of many models and algorithms used in modern machine learning, including linear models, multi-layer neural networks, support vector machines, density estimation methods, Bayesian belief networks, mixture models, clustering, ensamble methods, and reinforcement learning. The course will give the student the basic ideas and intuition behind these methods, as well as, a more formal understanding of how and why they work. Students will have an opportunity to experiment with machine learning techniques and apply them a selected problem in the context of a term project.

Course syllabus

Prerequisites

Knowledge of matrices and linear algebra (CS 0280), probability (CS 1151), statistics (CS 1000), programming (CS 1501) or equivalent, or the permission of the instructor.

• Chris Bishop. Pattern recognition and Machine Learning Springer, 2006.

• R.O. Duda, P.E. Hart, D.G. Stork. Pattern Classification. Second edition. John Wiley and Sons, 2000.
• C. Bishop. Neural networks for Pattern Recognition. Oxford University Press, 1995.
• J. Han, M. Kamber. Data mining. Concepts and Techniques. 2nd edition Morgan Kauffman.
• T. Mitchell. Machine Learning. Mc Graw Hill, 1997.

The homework assignments will have mostly a character of projects and will require you to implement some of the learning algorithms covered during lectures. Programming assignments will be implemented in Matlab. See rules for the submission of programs.

The assignments (both written and programming parts) are due at the beginning of the class on the day specified on the assignment. In general, no extensions will be granted.

Collaborations: No collaboration on homework assignments, programs, and exams is permitted unless you are specifically instructed to work in groups.
 

The term project is due at the end of the semester and accounts for a significant portion of your grade.

Matlab is a mathematical tool for numerical computation and manipulation, with excellent graphing capabilities. It provides a great deal of support and capabilities for things you will need to run Machine Learning experiments. The CSSD at UPitt offers $5 student licenses for Matlab. To obtain the licence please check the following link to the Matlab CSSD page . In addition, Upitt has a number of Matlab licences running on both unix and windows platforms. See the following web page for the details.

Matlab tutorial file.

Other Matlab resources on the web:

Online MATLAB  documentation
Online Mathworks documentation including MATLAB toolboxes

Cheating policy: Cheating and any other anti-intellectual behavior, including giving your work to someone else, will be dealt with severely and will result in the Fail (F) grade. If you feel you may have violated the rules speak to us as soon as possible. Please make sure you read, understand and abide by the Academic Integrity Code for the Faculty and College of Arts and Sciences.

Students With Disabilities:
If you have a disability for which you are or may be requesting an accommodation, you are encouraged to contact both your instructor and Disability Resources and Services, 216 William Pitt Union, (412) 648-7890/(412) 383-7355 (TTY), as early as possible in the term. DRS will verify your disability and determine reasonable accomodations for this course.

Course webpages from Spring 2011, Spring 2010, Spring 2004 and Spring 2003