Jump to: [Homeworks] [Projects]
Homeworks
There will be one homework (HW) for each topical unit of the course, due soon 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
- HW2: Cross-Validation, Regularization, and Hyperparameter Selection
- HW3: Classification
- HW4: Neural Networks and Backpropagation
- HW5: Neural Network Optimization and Architecture
- HW6: Decision Trees and Feature Importance
- HW7: Ensembles
- HW8: Recommender Systems and Dimensionality Reduction
- HW9: Clustering
Projects
There will be two larger "projects" throughout the semester:
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 "real world" use cases in text classification and recommendations of movies to users.
Each project will due 3-4 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 (4-7 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.