Course Outcome:
After taking this course, students will be able to understand and implement in Python algorithms of Unsupervised Machine Learning and apply them to real-world datasets.
Course Topics and Approach:
Unsupervised Machine Learning involves finding patterns in datasets. The core of this course involves study of the following algorithms:
Clustering: Hierarchical, DBSCAN, KMeans &Gaussian Mixture Model
Dimension Reduction:Principal Component Analysis
Unlike many other courses, this course:
Has a detailed presentation of the the math underlying the above algorithms, including normal distributions, expectation maximization, and singular value decomposition.
Has a detailed explanation of how algorithms are converted into Python code with lectures on code design and use of vectorization
Has questions (programming and theory)and solutions that allow learners to get practice with the course material
The course codes are then used to address case studies involving real-world data to perform dimension reduction/clustering for the Iris Flowers Dataset, MNISTDigits Dataset (images), and BBCText Dataset (articles).
Course Audience:
This course is designed for:
Scientists, engineers, and programmers and others interested in machine learning/data science
No prior experience with machine learning is needed
Students should have knowledge of
Basic linear algebra (vectors, transpose, matrices, matrix multiplication, inverses, determinants, linear spaces)
Basic probability and statistics (mean, covariance matrices, normal distributions)
Python 3 programming
Students should have a Python installation, such as the Anaconda platform, on their machine with the ability to run programs in the command window and in Jupyter Notebooks
Teaching Style and Resources:
Course includes many examples with plots and animations used to help students get a better understanding of the material
Course has many exercises with solutions (theoretical, Jupyter Notebook, and programming) to allow students to gain additional practice
All resources (presentations, supplementary documents, demos, codes, solutions to exercises) are downloadable from the course Github site.
2021.08.28 Update:
2021.11.02 Update:
Sections 2.3, 2.4, 3.4, 4.3:updates so codes can run in more recent versions of python and matplotlib and updates to presentations to point out the changes
