Second week of “Machine Learning”
Monday, April 21st, 2008Today is the second week of the “Machine Learning” class I teach with Christian Storm (I teach the first two and last three while Storm takes those in between when I am away in the UK for a trip).
The first week I cover basic probability theory and statistics, and this week I’ll cover linear models, both regression and classification. I get the feeling that this is a lot more mathematics and statistics than my students expected. I got the same impression last time I taught it. It is mainly computer science students, and at least in Aarhus, computer scientists really, really hate statistics.
Of course, it probably doesn’t improve on matters that we have a lot of basic stuff to cover the first week before we can get started on the proper machine learning material. It is not a statistics course, so I don’t want to spend more than a single week on the basic probability theory and statistics, but since this really is the necessary mathematics to understand what follows — and since probability and statistics is no longer a mandatory part of the introductory computer science program — it needs to be introduced.
Having to cover a lot of material in very little time, with students who in general do not really like the topic, is a bit of a problem for me. I do not feel that my approach is working, but I do not really have any good ideas about what else to do…