CSC 580: Principles of Machine Learning

Students will learn why machine learning is a fundamentally different way of writing computer programs, and why this approach is often a uniquely attractive way of solving practical problems. Machine learning is all about automatic ways for computers to find patterns in datasets; students will learn both advantages and unique risks that this approach offers. They will learn the fundamental computational methods, algorithms, and perspectives which underlie current machine learning methods, and how to derive and implement many of them.

Students will learn the fundamentals of unsupervised and supervised machine learning methods, the computational and quality tradeoffs between different methods, and how to adapt existing methods to fit their own research needs.