Academics

EECS 453: Principles of Machine Learning

Prerequisite
EECS 351, or EECS 301, or any linear algebra courses

Coverage
The class will cover basic principles in machine learning, such as unsupervised learning (e.g., clustering, mixture models, dimension reduction), supervised learning (e.g., regression, classification, neural networks & deep learning), and reinforcement learning. For each topic, key algorithmic ideas/intuitions and basic theoretical insights will be highlighted.

This is an entry-level machine learning course targeted for senior undergraduate EE and CE students, and junior master students outside the area of Signal and Image Processing & Machine Learning. Compared to EECS 445, this course places slightly greater emphasis on mathematical principles and is better suited for students who have limited experience with programming and machine learning.

Course Materials: slides and videos will be accessed via Canvas (TBA). Tentative topics that will be covered in this course are supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and reinforcement learning:

• Basics of probability, linear algebra, and optimization
• Regression and linear prediction
• Support vector machines and kernel methods
• Deep neural networks
• Dimension reduction: PCA, autoencoder
• Clustering (Kmeans, Mixture of Gaussians, EM)
• Representation learning: nonnegative matrix factorization, dictionary learning

Assessment: (i) 5 homework assignments (40%), (ii) mid-term exam (30%), (iii) course projects (25%), (iv) participation & course evaluation (5%)

Textbook: We recommend the following books and articles, although we will not follow them closely.

• Foundations of Machine Learning, by Mehryar Mohri, Afshin Rostamizadeh, and Ameet Talwalkar.
• The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction, by Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani, and Jerome Friedman.
• Deep Learning, by Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville.
• Mathematics for Machine Learning, by Marc Peter Deisenroth, A. Aldo Faisal, and Cheng Soon Ong.
• Linear Algebra and Optimization for Machine Learning, by Charu C. Aggarwal.

Related courses:

• EECS 445. Introduction to Machine Learning
• EECS 453. Applied Matrix Algorithms for Signal Processing, Data Analysis, and Machine Learning
• EECS 505. Computational Data Science and Machine Learning
• EECS 545. Machine Learning

Course Syllabus (Note: the schedule is tentative, and is subject to change during the semester.)

Week	Date	Topic	Contents	Homework, Review
Week-1-1	08/29	Introduction (Remote)	Course overview
Week-1-2	08/31	Supervised Learning (Remote)	Introduction to supervised learning, linear models, regularization	Linear Algebra Review
Week-2-1	09/05	Labor Day	No class
Week-2-2	09/07	Supervised Learning	Learning Theory	Probability Review, HW1 Release
Week-3-1	09/12	Supervised Learning	Linear regression I
Week-3-2	09/14	Supervised Learning	Linear regression II	Python Review
Week-4-1	09/19	Supervised Learning	Linear Classifiers
Week-4-2	09/21	Supervised Learning	Linear Discriminant Analysis	HW1 Due, HW2 Release
Week-5-1	09/26	Supervised Learning (remote)	Logistic regression
Week-5-2	09/28	Supervised Learning (remote)	Optimization methods I
Week-6-1	10/03	Supervised Learning	Optimization methods II
Week-6-2	10/05	Supervised Learning	Support vector machine (SVM) I	HW2 Due,  HW3 Release
Week-7-1	10/10	Supervised Learning	Support vector machine (SVM) II
Week-7-2	10/12	Supervised Learning	Support vector machine (SVM) III
Week-8-1	10/17	Fall Study Day	No class
Week-8-2	10/19	Supervised Learning	Dual SVM	HW3 Due
Week-9-1	10/24	Supervised Learning	Nonlinear models, kernel methods
Week-9-2	10/26	Supervised Learning	Introduction to deep neural networks I
Week-10-1	10/31	Supervised Learning	Introduction to deep neural networks II
Week-10-2	11/02	Supervised Learning	Introduction to deep neural networks III
Week-11-1	11/07	Midterm	Midterm
Week-11-2	11/09	Unsupervised Learning	Introduction to unsupervised learning, clustering problem, K-means	Project Proposal Due, HW4 Release
Week-12-1	11/14	Unsupervised Learning	K-means, mixtures of Gaussian, expectation maximization
Week-12-2	11/16	Unsupervised Learning	Dimension reduction, PCA
Week-13-1	11/21	Unsupervised Learning	Dimension reduction II
Week-13-2	11/23	Thanksgiving	No Class
Week-14-1	11/28	Unsupervised Learning (Remote)	Representation learning, matrix factorization	HW4 Due, HW5 Release
Week-14-2	11/30	Unsupervised Learning (Remote)	Autoencoder & self-supervised learning
Week-15-1	12/05	Unsupervised Learning	Generative Models	HW5 Due
Week-15-2	12/07	Final Presentation