A Free Course on Machine Learning & Data Science from Caltech

Right now, Machine Learn­ing and Data Sci­ence are two hot top­ics, the sub­ject of many cours­es being offered at uni­ver­si­ties today. Above, you can watch a playlist of 18 lec­tures from a course called Learn­ing From Data: A Machine Learn­ing Course, taught by Cal­tech’s Feyn­man Prize-win­ning pro­fes­sor Yas­er Abu-Mostafa. The course is sum­ma­rized as fol­lows:

This is an intro­duc­to­ry course in machine learn­ing (ML) that cov­ers the basic the­o­ry, algo­rithms, and appli­ca­tions. ML is a key tech­nol­o­gy in Big Data, and in many finan­cial, med­ical, com­mer­cial, and sci­en­tif­ic appli­ca­tions. It enables com­pu­ta­tion­al sys­tems to adap­tive­ly improve their per­for­mance with expe­ri­ence accu­mu­lat­ed from the observed data. ML has become one of the hottest fields of study today, tak­en up by under­grad­u­ate and grad­u­ate stu­dents from 15 dif­fer­ent majors at Cal­tech. This course bal­ances the­o­ry and prac­tice, and cov­ers the math­e­mat­i­cal as well as the heuris­tic aspects. The lec­tures fol­low each oth­er in a sto­ry-like fash­ion.

A real Cal­tech course (it’s not watered down at all), the course assumes a famil­iar­i­ty with basic prob­a­bil­i­ty, matri­ces, and cal­cu­lus.

The lec­tures can be found on YouTube, iTunes U and this Cal­tech web­site, which hosts slides and oth­er course mate­ri­als. The pro­fes­sor wrote the course text­book, also called Learn­ing from Data.

Learn­ing From Data will be per­ma­nent­ly added to our list of Free Online Com­put­er Sci­ence Cours­es, part of our ever-grow­ing col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

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