DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO
CSE 250B: Principles of Artificial Intelligence:
Learning
Winter 2010
Please ask questions on this message board.
OVERVIEW
CSE 250B is a graduate course devoted to the basic concepts and
algorithms
of supervised and unsupervised learning from
data. 250B is open to Ph.D. and M.S. students
in computer science, engineering, cognitive science, and related areas.
Other prospective participants, including enthusiastic undergraduates, are welcome, but should
contact the instructor at elkan@cs.ucsd.edu.
For registration, the section id of CSE 250B is 672198.
Important
note: Registration is currently maxed out, at 48 students.
The limit is due to the number of seats in the classroom.
After some students drop, there
will
likely be enough space for everyone who is interested. Please
email the instructor if you are interested and you have not been able
to register. All CSE students and all PhD students will be
allowed in, regardless of enrollment limits. If necessary, we
will find a larger room.
The specific topics discussed in CSE 250B will include, not necessarily in this order,
- perceptron methods
- classification based on Bayes' rule
- nearest neighbor methods
- logistic regression and log-linear models
- stochastic gradient descent training
- estimating well-calibrated conditional probabilities
- kernel methods including support vector machines (SVMs)
- performance evaluation: precision, recall, cross-validation
-
the problem of overfitting, Occam's razor, and regularization
-
making optimal decisions given costs and probabilities
- unsupervised learning and clustering
- generative models, especially multivariate Gaussians
- expectation-maximization (EM)
- dimensionality reduction: principal component analysis
- learning to predict structured outputs, especially sequences
Two important topics that will not be covered are graphical models and reinforcement learning. The instructor is Charles
Elkan, Professor. For office hours, please send email to arrange an
appointment.
The
only prerequisite for 250B is graduate status at UCSD, or consent of
the instructor for undergraduates. All CSE graduate students will
be allowed into the course even if it is officially full.
CSE 250A (taught by Prof.
Lawrence Saul) and 250B are complementary. Students may take one
or
both courses: neither is a prerequisite for the other, and there
will be little overlap.
LECTURES
Lectures will be on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 3:30pm to 4:50pm in the
CSE building, room 2154. For lecture notes from the Fall 2008
version of 250B,
see http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/users/elkan/250Bfall2008. The first lecture will be on Thursday January 5.
January 5
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Topic
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Assignment
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TEXTBOOKS
The course will not be based on any single book. The
following textbooks are recommended as references:
For a price comparison among web booksellers use addall.com
with the ISBN numbers.
Some topics discussed in class will not be in any textbook,
and many will be explained differently, so coming to lectures and taking notes
carefully is important. Examinations will be
based mainly on the online lecture notes.
ASSIGNMENTS AND GRADING
Instead of a midterm exam, there will
be a five-minute in-class quiz at the start of every Thursday lecture
(10% of your overall grade), a
final examination (30%), and four project assignments (15% each).
You should do each project with one partner, so individual
work will count for 40% of your grade and joint work for 60%. You
are free to change partners, or not, between projects.
Each project will last between two and three weeks and will
require coding, experimenting with data, and writing a report.
Using a high-level environment such as Matlab or R
is encouraged. Projects will be graded based exclusively on the written
report. Each pair of partners should hand in their joint report
at the start of class on the day that the report
is due. Each day that a report is late will cost 20% of the
maximum
score available for the project. Reports will be evaluated
using grading criteria similar to those in this form. Complete academic honesty is always
required.
The due dates for the four projects will be Thursday January 21, February 4, Tuesday February 23, and Thursday March 11.
The
final exam will be on Tuesday March 16 at 3pm. The last lecture will be on Thursday March 11.
There is no a priori correspondence between
letter grades and numerical scores on the assignments or on the exam.
You can evaluate your performance in the class by comparing your scores
with the means and standard deviations, which will be announced.
However there is also no fixed correspondence between letter grades and
standard deviations above or below the mean. If all students do well
in the absolute, then all students will get a good grade.
You should not drop CSE 250B just because you are unhappy with the score
that you receive on a project. Instead, you should make an appointment
to discuss with the instructor how you can do better on following projects.
Most recently updated on Novmber 5, 2009 by Charles Elkan, elkan@cs.ucsd.edu.