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Introduction Machine Learning and Pattern Recognition

This document provides information about the MLPR course administration including contact details for the lecturers, course materials and website, assessment tasks and deadlines, and a suggested work pattern for students. The main assessments are weekly tasks from weeks 3-6 and 8-11 including introductory questions, discussion groups, and assessed questions on past material. There is also a mid-term class test in week 8.

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21 views

Introduction Machine Learning and Pattern Recognition

This document provides information about the MLPR course administration including contact details for the lecturers, course materials and website, assessment tasks and deadlines, and a suggested work pattern for students. The main assessments are weekly tasks from weeks 3-6 and 8-11 including introductory questions, discussion groups, and assessed questions on past material. There is also a mid-term class test in week 8.

Uploaded by

zeliawillscumberg
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Course administration

Welcome to MLPR! We’re your lecturers, Iain Murray and Arno Onken. You can email us
directly: [email protected] and [email protected]. (There are multiple Iain Murray’s at
the University; please use the email addresses given here.) However, if at all possible post
your question to the hypothesis class forum instead.
VIDEO 2020-09-17_00-00-00_arnos_introduction_video_for_mlpr
The University of Edinburgh official course descriptor:
http://www.drps.ed.ac.uk/20-21/dpt/cxinfr11130.htm
Updates and materials all appear on the course page:
https://mlpr.inf.ed.ac.uk/
Please check regularly for updates to your weekly goals, opportunities to meet, and so on.
Machine Learning is growing in importance as a tool for other fields and in industry, and
there’s a lot of fun stuff in this course. We hope you’ll enjoy it. However, this isn’t the right
course for everyone. This course isn’t necessary to apply machine learning, it’s building
up technical expertise towards being able to research new machine learning methods. If
you’re mainly interested in picking up some machine learning tools, you should take a more
applied course.

1 Course selection advice


If you haven’t taken Introductory Applied Machine Learning (IAML), or a course like it, consider
taking that instead of MLPR. Every year some students take MLPR without the required
background (often the maths background) and then fail it. Don’t be one of these students!
Take a look at the maths and programming self-test and notes on the course website, and
ask yourself honestly whether this is material you understand.
If you are an Informatics undergrad student, this course reviews some of the same material
as Inf2B Learning and IAML, but will be more technical. (Neither course is a pre-requisite.)
If you didn’t enjoy those courses, you should avoid MLPR! If you did like them, this course
should reinforce and then extend that material.
Don’t take both IAML and MLPR at the same time. Undergraduates should space out
the material to get full benefit. MSc students should get more breadth out of a one-year
programme, and study an application area of machine learning or other fundamentals in
informatics. You’ll have a broader set of projects available, and you’ll have more to talk about
at the end of your studies.
Machine Learning Practical (MLP), for those eligible, is a great course for spending more time
on advanced practical skills. It is only a narrow part of machine learning though. Only take
MLP if you are taking one of IAML and MLPR, or have already taken one of these or a
similar broad machine learning course.
If you’ve already enrolled in MLPR, don’t be afraid to change your course selection. Keep an
open mind about whether you should really be taking the course, and don’t be embarrassed
to change if you find you don’t have the required background.

2 Notes
You should take your own notes while working through the materials. Especially anything
that surprises you, or anything that you should work through with other students later.
Despite our best efforts, our notes will contain some mistakes and unclear parts. Please make
use of the hypothesis class forum, a web-based annotation tool. You can quickly highlight

MLPR:w0a Iain Murray and Arno Onken, http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/courses/mlpr/2020/ 1


any part of the notes that need fixing or clarifying. Don’t be afraid to be picky, We want to
fix mistakes of any size (including typos) that might confuse others. We are also more than
happy to expand on the material where student discussion reveals it’s necessary.
We give pointers to textbooks where reviewing the material from another point of view may
be useful. However, except where stated as part of an exercise, we’re only expecting you to
be familiar with the material we cover in the materials provided.
Some material in the notes is marked either “non-examinable” or “for keen students”, which
means we’re not expecting you to study this material, but hope some of you will find it
interesting. That said, you will be expected to be able to generalize your knowledge to
models and machine learning problems that you haven’t seen. If you do read advanced
topics, and outside the course materials, that will be easier.

3 Main assessed tasks and deadlines


We will tell you what you need to do each week on the Weekly Activities pages.
Hard deadlines, Fridays of weeks 3–6 and 8–11 to complete that week’s set of tasks. These
Fridays are: 9, 16, 23, 30 October, 13, 20, 27 November, and 4 December.
These tasks are equally weighted and form 80% of your mark. Late submissions will not be
accepted. Most students are ill or have a bad week at some point in the Semester, so we will
drop the lowest-scoring assignment from your average. Please approach student support
(not the lecturers) if you are unable to work for more than one week.
Week 7 is MLPR’s reading week: other classes will be running, but we are having a break
from releasing extra material or activities, to provide some clear self-study time.
Week 8 class test: Monday 9 November. 20% of your mark for the class.
There is no final exam this year (2020/21 session).
Our aim with regular assessment, with no extensions, is to give you timely feedback and
to avoid people falling behind. We intend the workload to be manageable (10–13 hours a
week) for someone with the background pre-requisites, and have tried to give you flexibility
over when you study. Nevertheless, however we structure things, learning substantial new
material is hard work.
If you have special circumstances that affect more than one of the weekly hand-ins, you
will have to follow University Procedures. If the weekly deadlines really can’t work for you
(e.g., because of a relevant disability or chronic illness), you should formally agree learning
adjustments with the University and tell us now.

3.1 The weekly tasks


You should spend the first two weeks getting on top of the tools we’re using, getting to
know people in the class, and getting comfortable with the introductory material.
The weekly tasks from week 3 include a mixture of mathematical reasoning, short program-
ming exercises, and short written discussions. Some must be done individually, others may
be done with others, as instructed.

• Introductory questions in the notes: You must make an honest attempt of these,
doing so contributes to your mark. However, learning involves making mistakes, so
getting some of these questions wrong is expected and will not itself affect your mark.
Do attempt these questions as you read, and don’t stress out about them. However,
you need to try: frequent blank, or meaningless answers will mean you don’t obtain
the credit for these questions.

MLPR:w0a Iain Murray and Arno Onken, http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/courses/mlpr/2020/ 2


• Discussion group task: Discussion groups (starting week 3) are also primarily to help
you learn, and marks here will be coarse grained. Explaining your machine learning
thinking to others is valued in research and industry, and is a learning objective of the
course.
• Assessed questions: These will be based on material from previous weeks, and will
have the strongest influence on your grade. It’s important to discuss the relevant
material in the week(s) before these are due, because no one will tell you the answers
to these questions.

3.2 Suggested work pattern


The intended rhythm for each of weeks 3–6 and 8–11 is as follows:

• From Monday: Start learning the new material for the week, answering questions in
the notes as you go. Materials will be released by the previous Thursday, giving you
some flexibility to get ahead if your schedule requires it.
• By Thursday complete the discussion task on this week’s material, and make sure
you’ve asked questions about anything that isn’t making sense.
• By Friday: You must have submitted: 1) questions in this week’s notes; 2) an output
from the discussion task; 3) assessed questions on the material from the previous
week. We will try to give you feedback on this submission by Wednesday. (We tried
and failed; sorry.) We will give you feedback on this submission by the next Friday.

We strongly suggest that you submit everything by Thursday (pretend it’s the deadline), and
have the assessed questions finished well before then. There has to be a deadline somewhere,
and we cannot accept late submissions. If you routinely leave things until Friday, you are
likely to miss more than one deadline and lose substantial marks for the class.
Don’t stress out if your answers aren’t good one week: if you get a C (50%) instead of an
A (70%) you’ll only reduce your course average by around 2% and your year average by a
fraction of a percent. But do always hand something in on time: after the first missing/late
submission, each further missing/late submission would contributes a zero to your average,
and would reduce your course mark by a roughly a whole grade.
It’s up to you exactly when you do the assessed questions, to fit in with your other commit-
ments. If you finish the hand-in by Thursday (as recommended) you will have some clear
time on Friday. You can also continue into the next week, but we suggest getting them done
well before the deadline, in case of unexpected difficulties, and so you can concentrate on
new material.

MLPR:w0a Iain Murray and Arno Onken, http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/courses/mlpr/2020/ 3

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