Announcing that he updated his course certainly gained more attention than saying it will be available in June
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31204055
I certainly was excited when I saw this headline. Thought maybe it was early
Andrew Ng updates his Machine Learning course
101–110 of 131 posts
Re: Andrew Ng updates his Machine Learning course
#102Really great course, highly recommend it. It demystifies so much :)
If one is a seasoned software engineer, but has little experience in ML or deep learning, is this course still suitable?
Definitely. It starts from first principles, linear algebra, and goes from there. It's an amazing course.
Re: Andrew Ng updates his Machine Learning course
#103I took this when it was mlcourse along with the aicourse by Peter Norvig. I was in research at the time. They were entertaining, but certainly mainly an intellectual curiosity for both academics and practitioners. Nowadays
Practitioners would most likely use an ML library.
Re: Andrew Ng updates his Machine Learning course
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
The programming assignments were one or two lines in Octave. They'll turn into 10 lines of Python with indentation errors. Python is a worse pedagogical language for any course in applied linear algebra.
OTOH, the time I spent learning Octave/Matlab for Andrew Ng's course was 100% wasted time, because I've never used it again in the 10+ years since I took the class, whereas time spent learning Python would've been useful to me in myriad other ways.
The amount of Octave needed for the class was manageable.
Learning Octave made me wish all languages supported matrices, vectors, and the necessary operations.
Re: Andrew Ng updates his Machine Learning course
#105Really great course, highly recommend it. It demystifies so much :)
If one is a seasoned software engineer, but has little experience in ML or deep learning, is this course still suitable?
If you remember highschool AP math, you're good. Otherwise, check out ISLR for a faster intro, capped by your ability to read
Re: Andrew Ng updates his Machine Learning course
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Question: Why was the original version in Matlab? I am familiar with Python, R, and others.... I get that those languages until recently might not have been great over the ancient predecessors (LISP, etc) for ML related. But I've never seen actual production anything in Matlab. Did Matlab provide something at the time others did not? If so, how did they transfer MatLab to running production models? Or did they create…
Before Python (Numpy/Scipy) really came into its own (which didn't quite happen until early 2010s), Matlab was among the easiest-to-use scripting languages for writing scientific computing programs. I was in university (Bachelor's + Masters) from 2007-2012 and learned Matlab extensively in my numerical computing classes (I was a Physics major, for what that's worth). When you're ready to run your scientific computing…
@telotortium - hey thank you so much for adding that context, it is incredibly helpful. Now I can internalize why it was Matlab. The update to python is going to scale it to a new level of learners!
Re: Andrew Ng updates his Machine Learning course
#107So what, concretely, has changed?
Re: Andrew Ng updates his Machine Learning course
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't do these particular courses but I found it a lot easier to stay motivated with the top down approach. First demonstrate usefulness, then deepen fundamentals. When I was younger and didn't work full time + have other commitments the bottoms up approach appealed to me more, I think partially because I had bigger time blocks to allocate. i.e I could spend a whole weekend just learning fundamentals of some parti…
Jeremy Howard came off as anti-intellectual to me. He is always like "oh math is nothing... you do not need math... math is not needed" and stuff like that. Other than that, fast.ai is a great resource, and Jeremy Howard is a great instructor. You will learn very practical tools and tricks, and a lot of recent research is demystified, but don't expect to achieve deep, general insights. Also, fast.ai is a very very li…
I wouldn't say Jeremy is anti-intellectual, but he does know that a lot of people get turned off from the AI field because they are afraid of the math, and a lot of other courses (used to?) start with the math. So he makes sure early and often to tell people that you don't need to understand the math that is happening deep under the hood in order to do productive, even state-of-the-art, research with AI.
Re: Andrew Ng updates his Machine Learning course
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are the others? Any recommendations?
I took these courses from Georgia Tech via OMSCS but they are also on udacity. https://omscs.gatech.edu/cs-7641-machine-learning https://omscs.gatech.edu/cs-7642-reinforcement-learning (I took this before ML but its supposed to come after. There is some overlap. Probably my favorite graduate course.) https://omscs.gatech.edu/cs-7646-machine-learning-trading (IMO not amazing) Much more basic (took this before OMSCS):…
I found ML4T to be really accessible and fun. Cannot say the same for ML.
Re: Andrew Ng updates his Machine Learning course
#110I'll say that that waitlist registration form is very sketchy. Agreeing to receive marketing updates is required to join a waitlist for a course? Classy move.