Assignments

Homeworks

There will be one homework (HW) for each topical unit of the course. Due about a week after we finish that unit.

These are intended to build your conceptual analysis skills plus your implementation skills in Python.

• HW0: Numerical Programming Fundamentals
• HW1: Regression, Cross-Validation, and Regularization
• HW2: Evaluating Binary Classifiers and Implementing Logistic Regression
• HW3: Neural Networks and Stochastic Gradient Descent
• HW4: Trees
• HW5: Kernel Methods and PCA

Quizzes

After completing each unit, there will be a 20 minute quiz (taken online via gradescope).

Each quiz will be designed to assess your conceptual understanding about each unit.

Probably 10 questions. Most questions will be true/false or multiple choice, with perhaps 1-3 short answer questions.

You can view the conceptual questions in each unit's in-class demos/labs and homework as good practice for the corresponding quiz.

Projects

There will be three larger "projects" throughout the semester:

• Project A: Classifying Images with Feature Transformations
• Project B: Classifying Sentiment from Text Reviews
• Project C: Recommendation Systems for Movies

Projects are meant to be open-ended and encourage creativity. They are meant to be case studies of applications of the ML concepts from class to three "real world" use cases: image classification, text classification, and recommendations of movies to users.

Each project will due approximately 4 weeks after being handed out. Start early! Do not wait until the last few days.

Projects will generally be centered around a particular methodology for solving a specific task and involve significant programming (with some combination of developing core methods from scratch or using existing libraries). You will need to consider some conceptual issues, write a program to solve the task, and evaluate your program through experiments to compare the performance of different algorithms and methods.

Your main deliverable will be a short report (2-4 pages), describing your approach and providing several figures/tables to explain your results to the reader.

You’ll be assessed on effort, the sophistication of your technical approach, the clarity of your explanations, the evidence that you present to support your evaluative claims, and the performance of your implementation. A high-performing approach with little explanation will receive little credit, while a careful set of experiments that illuminate why a particular direction turned out to be a dead end may receive close to full credit.