I tried to do a couple coursera courses and found the video lectures highly inefficient; very needlessly time consuming, even watching them sped up. All I really want is a glorified text book with quiz grading and a final.
Neural Networks for Machine Learning
11–20 of 58 posts
Re: Neural Networks for Machine Learning
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
the only real problem with coursera is everyone is posting their solutions to github, so its gonna be impossible for them to prevent cheating. i agree with you though, that the flexibility it is offering is amazing
There is an interesting practical question here. Why cheat? If you are taking a class voluntarily over the Internet, what benefit would be gained by cheating? I presume that a large fraction of people who are doing volunteer coursework are doing it to learn, not to keep a GPA up for some other reason (sports eligibility, scholarship requirements, parental expectations, Etc.) so looking at other solutions on Github mi…
It depends on the purpose of your education. In an ideal world, it would be just to learn, but I think employers at some level look at grades/school as a qualification process.
Re: Neural Networks for Machine Learning
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
It just started on Monday, there's plenty of time to join in. There have been some huge developments in neural networks in the last few years, particularly with respect to deep learning. If you missed out on that you might want to try this class. Hinton has been involved in many of these advances. The second half of the course appears to focus on deep learning topics so you might want to start there if you already kn…
you cant start mid-way though ... right ?
You'll have to wait until those lectures are made available, but you don't have to complete the previous work to see the lectures.
Re: Neural Networks for Machine Learning
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is an interesting practical question here. Why cheat? If you are taking a class voluntarily over the Internet, what benefit would be gained by cheating? I presume that a large fraction of people who are doing volunteer coursework are doing it to learn, not to keep a GPA up for some other reason (sports eligibility, scholarship requirements, parental expectations, Etc.) so looking at other solutions on Github mi…
It depends on the purpose of your education. In an ideal world, it would be just to learn, but I think employers at some level look at grades/school as a qualification process.
I see where you are coming from but were I interviewing you I would never even think to wonder about a self reported grade in a volunteer class. If the topic was important to the position I'd ask you to talk about it and tell me what you learned. I would hope I could spot you trying to feed me a line.
At the end of the day, as an employer, I am looking for 'learners' not 'cheaters.' If it turns out that an employee's personality/choices lean toward the cheating side I try to manage them out of the organization as smoothly as I can.
Re: Neural Networks for Machine Learning
#15I'm in the middle of the machine learning coursera course, and registered for this one as well due to interest in the material. My one complaint is that the programming assignments weren't interesting at all. The results were interesting, but the setups were mostly given to us, and we just had to code an algorithm that was in our notes. For someone who understands the basics of linear algebra and programming, it was…
> The results were interesting, but the setups were mostly given to us, and we just had to code an algorithm that was in our notes.
Right; I agree. I'm not sure how they would go about making it more challenging though. They can't expect us to go out and collect data ourselves, after all. I suppose they could give us the data, then expect us to code the setup and algorithms up ourselves, but that, too, would become repetitive after a few assignments.
> Not to knock the course. I've learned a lot and the professor (Andrew Ng) does a good job.
Agreed once again. I knew nothing about machine learning before starting; now I know about neural networks, SVMs, and PCM. It's really cool how much I've learned already, for free, too!
I've also signed up for this course, but the quizzes really aren't up to par. As an example: the first quiz question was about training a neural network with too much data, and about whether or not said network would be able to generalize to new test cases. Overfitting neural networks wasn't even mentioned in the lectures; I had to rely on material from Andrew's class to answer the question correctly. This chasm between the lectures and the quizzes is likely because Geoffrey is the one creating the video lectures, but he's not the one creating the quiz questions; he is having TAs do it [1].
Nevertheless, it looks like they're responding to feedback, so hopefully it'll get better with time.
1. https://class.coursera.org/neuralnets-2012-001/wiki/view?pag...
Re: Neural Networks for Machine Learning
#16I'm in the middle of the machine learning coursera course, and registered for this one as well due to interest in the material. My one complaint is that the programming assignments weren't interesting at all. The results were interesting, but the setups were mostly given to us, and we just had to code an algorithm that was in our notes. For someone who understands the basics of linear algebra and programming, it was…
Hi,
I am also taking the course by Andrew Ng and understand your complaint that the programming assignments aren't as interesting ( from your perspective). Being quite comfortable with linear algebra, I was able to complete the assignments easily.
But when I go through the course forums, I find that for many people taking the course, the intuition behind the use of linear algebra in ML doesn't come as easy as it does for us. I think when Andrew Ng designed this online course, he must have had those people in mind also. I think he mentions it at the start of the course that it's more about understanding the concepts and the implementation details should come later. The programming exercises are designed keeping that in mind, I think.
I tried to make the programming exercises interesting for myself, by first thoroughly understanding the code that they had provided and tweaking it here and there. Once you have done that, you could apply what you've learnt on real world datasets from sources like Kaggle and see how you fare :)
Re: Neural Networks for Machine Learning
#17The only course that is not significantly diluted is Koller's PGM. All others have been dumbed down to a degree where they provide no challenge to the courseree at all.
Re: Neural Networks for Machine Learning
#18I'm in the middle of the machine learning coursera course, and registered for this one as well due to interest in the material. My one complaint is that the programming assignments weren't interesting at all. The results were interesting, but the setups were mostly given to us, and we just had to code an algorithm that was in our notes. For someone who understands the basics of linear algebra and programming, it was…
> My one complaint is that the programming assignments weren't interesting at all. The results were interesting, but the setups were mostly given to us, and we just had to code an algorithm that was in our notes. For someone who understands the basics of linear algebra and programming, it was just a syntax challenge, and that got irritating after a bit so I stopped doing them.
I agree with this. The programming assignments I've done so far in the Machine Learning class are usually 5-7 matlab functions, many of which are about 2 lines of code (the longer ones might be ~10 lines of code). If you've ever done matlab/octave programming the assignments will take about 20-30 minutes and be completely unenlightening as you're literally just translating mathematical notation into matlab (which is, by design, already a lot like mathematical notation anyway). They provide entirely way too much skeleton code to learn anything from if you're not actively trying to learn. If I weren't already mostly familiar with most of the material presented in the class, I imagine I would never retain knowledge of how the machine learning "pipeline" worked or have any high-level understanding of the algorithms, because the assignments just require you to implement the mathematical pieces of each step, without ever asking you to, for example, actually call any optimization routines, or put the pipeline together.
The problem, I think, is that it would just be too difficult to do automatic grading in a way that is reasonably possible to pass if they don't turn most of the work into skeleton code. Since the automatic grading needs nearly exactly matching results, one minor implementation difference in a perfectly good implementation of the algorithm itself (e.g., picking a single parameter incorrectly, picking the optimization termination conditions incorrectly, choosing a different train/dev split, etc.) would make the entire solution completely wrong.
Re: Neural Networks for Machine Learning
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
It depends on the purpose of your education. In an ideal world, it would be just to learn, but I think employers at some level look at grades/school as a qualification process.
I see where you are coming from but were I interviewing you I would never even think to wonder about a self reported grade in a volunteer class. If the topic was important to the position I'd ask you to talk about it and tell me what you learned. I would hope I could spot you trying to feed me a line. At the end of the day, as an employer, I am looking for 'learners' not 'cheaters.' If it turns out that an employee's…
If it were a traditional class at a traditional school you'd just assume they actually learned it?
Re: Neural Networks for Machine Learning
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see where you are coming from but were I interviewing you I would never even think to wonder about a self reported grade in a volunteer class. If the topic was important to the position I'd ask you to talk about it and tell me what you learned. I would hope I could spot you trying to feed me a line. At the end of the day, as an employer, I am looking for 'learners' not 'cheaters.' If it turns out that an employee's…
If it were a traditional class at a traditional school you'd just assume they actually learned it?
Hmm, that is a fair question. I think I would give more weight to a class if they took it when they didn't have to, rather than having taken is a part of a requirement for a degree.