COMP SCI 3314 - Introduction to Statistical Machine Learning

Statistical Machine Learning is concerned with algorithms that automatically improve their performance through 'learning'. For example, computer programs that learn to detect humans in images/video; predict stock markets, and rank web pages. Statistical machine learning has emerged mainly from computer science and artificial intelligence, and has connections to a variety of related subjects including statistics, applied mathematics and pattern analysis. Applications include image and audio signal analysis, data mining, bioinformatics and exploratory data analysis in natural science and engineering. This is an introductory course on statistical machine learning which presents an overview of many fundamental concepts, popular techniques, and algorithms in statistical machine learning. It covers basic topics such as dimensionality reduction, linear classification and regression as well as more recent topics such as ensemble learning/boosting, support vector machines, kernel methods and manifold learning. This course will provide the students the basic ideas and intuition behind modern statistical machine learning methods. After studying this course, students will understand how, why, and when machine learning works on practical problems.