Information

Instructor: Vibhav Gogate (Email: vgogate at hlt dot utdallas dot edu)

Basic Information

Semester: Fall 2020
Where: Online
When: Friday 10 AM to 12:45 PM (via MS Teams)
Instructor Office hours: Friday 4 PM to 5 PM (via MS Teams)
Class Discussions: We will have a discussion board for the class on Piazza. This will be the main on-line forum for discussing assignments and course material, and interacting with other students and me. I will also post course-wide announcements on Piazza.

Course Overview

The main objective of this course is to introduce students to machine learning, the study of computer systems that improve their performance automatically through experience. Students will learn the latest machine learning algorithms and models that constitute typical machine learning systems. They will also gain the necessary foundations and background to both build practical machine learning systems and conduct research in machine learning.

Textbooks

Unfortunately, a book that contains all material we will cover does not exist. Therefore, we will use a combination of books and online material.

We will use:

Machine Learning by Tom Mitchell.
Machine Learning: a Probabilistic Perspective by Kevin Murphy.
Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning by Christopher M. Bishop.
Deep Learning Book by Ian Goodfellow and Yoshua Bengio and Aaron Courville.

Optional

Pattern Classification, 2nd Edition by Richard O. Duda, Peter E. Hart, David G. Stork.
The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction by Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani and Jerome Friedman.
Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques (Third Edition) by Ian H. Witten, Eibe Frank and Mark A. Hall.
Principles of Data Mining (Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning) by David J. Hand, Heikki Mannila and Padhraic Smyth.

Grading

60% Homeworks (5 homeworks), 20% Midterm 1, 20% Midterm 2.
Exams will be conducted online. Details: TBD.
A (92 and above), A- (88-91), B+ (84-87), B (81-83), B- (78-80), C+, C, F (75 and below).
Class attendance and Piazza participation is mandatory.