CSE 291F. Unsupervised Learning

Assignments Syllabus Readings

Spring 2010
Professor: Lawrence Saul
Lectures: Tue/Thu 11:00 am - 12:20 pm
Location: Cognitive Science Building 004
Office hours: after class and/or by appointment.
Units: 4

Course Description

The lectures in this course will survey leading algorithms for unsupervised learning and high dimensional data analysis. The first part of the course will cover probabilistic/generative models of high dimensional data, including Gaussian mixture models, factor analysis, nonnegative matrix factorization, exponential family PCA, probabilistic latent semantic analysis, latent Dirichlet allocation, independent component analysis, and learning in deep neural networks. The second part of the course will cover spectral methods for dimensionality reduction, including multidimensional scaling, Isomap, maximum variance unfolding, locally linear embedding, graph Laplacian methods, spectral clustering, and kernel PCA.

Prerequisites

The course is aimed at graduate students in machine learning and related fields. Students should have earned a high grade in a previous, related course, such as CSE 250A, CSE 250B, ECE 271A, or ECE 271B. The course will be taught by lecture in the same style as CSE 250A, though at a more advanced mathematical level. Auditors are welcome, subject to available seating. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor.

Assignments

There will be three homework assignments (60%) and a final course project (40%). Students may also be required to submit "scribe notes" (handwritten or typeset) on a small subset of lectures.

Tentative Syllabus

Tue Mar 30 Course overview. Review of clustering: k-means algorithm, Gaussian mixture modeling.
Thu Apr 01 Review of linear dimensionality reduction: principal component analysis, factor analysis.
Tue Apr 06 EM algorithms for factor analysis, principal component analysis, and mixture of factor analyzers.
Thu Apr 08 Nonnegative matrix factorization: cost functions and multiplicative updates.
Tue Apr 13 Nonnegative matrix factorization: auxiliary functions and proofs of convergence.
Thu Apr 15 Exponential family PCA.
Tue Apr 20 Multiview dimensionality reduction.
Thu Apr 22 Document modeling: bag-of-words representation, probabilistic latent semantic indexing, Dirichlet models.
Tue Apr 27 Latent Dirichlet allocation.
Thu Apr 29 Variational approximations for inference.
Tue May 04 Independent component analysis: maximum likelihood, contrast functions.
Thu May 06 Independent component analysis: fastICA, blind source separation. Example project presentation.
Tue May 11 Singular value decomposition, low-rank matrix approximations, multidimensional scaling.
Thu May 13 Manifold learning, Isomap algorithm.
Tue May 18 Nystrom approximation; maximum variance unfolding (MVU).
Thu May 20 Spectral clustering, normalized cuts, graph partitioning.
Tue May 25 Laplacian eigenmaps, locally linear embedding (LLE).
Thu May 27 Low rank factorizations for MVU, kernel PCA; class evaluations.
Tue Jun 01 Student presentations: Avinash Atreya, Do-Kyun Kim, Mandar Dixit & Weixin Li, Maria Mubin, Matan Hofri.
Thu Jun 03 Student presentations: , Michael Zhang, Randy West, Son Pham, Sushma Bannur, Tomoki Tsuchida, Ying Li.

Readings

Probabilistic PCA

Nonnegative matrix factorization

Exponential family PCA

Document modeling

Independent component analysis

Deep architectures

Multidimensional scaling and Nystrom approximation

Isomap and extensions

Maximum variance unfolding

Spectral clustering

Graph Laplacian methods

Locally linear embedding and related work

Kernel PCA