I recently completed the Machine Learning class offered online for free by Stanford University. This class taught me a lot of cool things I can do with Machine Learning, like how to build a recommender system or how to know if you are going in the right direction with an ML problem, or not. I totally recommend this course to anyone who is interested in learning Ml. The best part of the class is that you can take it at anytime you want, either download the online lectures and watch them at your own leisure or stream the videos. Of course, if you stream the videos, you have the added advantage of answering the few questions in the middle of the lecture. You would have to complete a bunch of lectures, programming assignments and review questions by the end of the week. The online forum they have set up is also pretty cool, with people discussing interesting stuff or issues with their homework solutions. The submissions of the programming assignments happen via script and you get back the results immediately.
Prof. Andrew Ng takes the class through all sorts of difficult problems with ease and he has a superb knack of getting students to understand tough concepts easily. That coupled with his frequent reminders like “If that doesn’t make sense to you, don’t worry about it.” is a perfect example of how he puts his students at ease, while at the same time conveying all important concepts very clearly.
This course is being offered again in Jan’s and recommend al of those interested to sign up at http://jan2012.ml-class.org/. Believe me it will be one of the most interesting classes you have attended.
Hats off to the ml-class team and I am already planning to attend the algo-class offered in Jan, thanks to the amount I have learned with ml-class!
Here is a link to the brief intro to the class in Prof Andrew’s own words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0WKJLovaZg
Gopi Krishnan Nambiar 25 December 2011