SC:Soft Computing

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The following are last minute news you should be aware of ;-) 

 27/07/2011: published the results from the 14/07/2011 exam

Course Website and Material

The official course website is maintained by Andrea Bonarini at [1]

Exam Results

From time to time, you can find here results for the Soft Computing exams, please refer to the official course website for up to date news:



The following are last minute news you should be aware of ;-) 

25/07/2011: final grades (including homeworks) for the 15/07/2011 and 29/06/2011 are at this link!
12/07/2011: 29/06/2011 exam grades of are available at this link!
12/07/2011: published the 29/06/2011 exam pdf
27/06/2011: HOMEWORK EXTENSION! The new deadline is 08/07/2011
23/06/2011: a few hints for the homework and a new version (just a footnote)
17/06/2011: a minor fix to the HOMEWORK and new slides about model selection updated
09/06/2011: The HOMEWORK is out, check at the end of this page!!!!
12/04/2011: detailed schedule modified; no lecture on 18/5 and additional lectures on 31/05 and 01/06 (I forgot them originally)
14/03/2011: added the detailed schedule. NOTE that tomorrow class starts at 14:15 instead of 13:15
08/03/2011: the course started today!

Course Aim & Organization

The objective of this course is to give an advanced presentation of the techniques most used in artificial intelligence and machine learning for pattern recognition, knowledge discovery, and data analysis/modeling.

Teachers

The course is composed by a blending of lectures and exercises by the course teacher and some teaching assistants.

Course Program

Techniques from machine and statistical learning are presented from a theoretical (i.e., statistics and information theory) and practical perspective through the descriptions of algorithms, the theory behind them, their implementation issues, and few examples from real applications. The course follows, at least partially, the outline of The Elements of Statistical Learning book (by Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani, and Jerome Friedman):

  • Machine Learning and Pattern Classification: in this part of the course the general concepts of Machine Learning and Patter Recognition are introduced with a brief review of statistics and information theory;
  • Unsupervised Learning Techniques: the most common approaches to unsupervised learning are described mostly focusing on clustering techniques, rule induction, Bayesian networks and density estimators using mixure models;
  • Supervised Learning Techniques: in this part of the course the most common techniques for Supervised Learning are described: decision trees, decision rules, Bayesian classifiers, hidden markov models, lazy learners, etc.
  • Feature Selection and Reduction: techniques for data rediction and feature selection will be presented with theory and applications
  • Model Validation and Selection: model validation and selection are orthogonal issues to previous technique; during the course the fundamentals are described and discussed (e.g., AIC, BIC, cross-validation, etc. ).

Detailed course schedule

A detailed schedule of the course can be found here; topics are just indicative while days and teachers are correct up to some last minute change (I will notify you by email). Please note that not all Tuesdays and Wednesdays are in!!

Date Day Time Room Teacher Topic
08/03/2011 Tuesday 13:15 - 16:15 3.6 Matteo Matteucci Course Introduction (Ch. 1)
15/03/2011 Tuesday 14:15 - 16:15 3.6 Matteo Matteucci Two examples from classification (Ch. 2)
22/03/2011 Tuesday 13:15 - 15:15 3.6 Matteo Matteucci Discriminating functions, decision boundary and Linear Regression (Ch.4.1, Ch. 4.2)
23/03/2011 Wednesday 14:15 - 16:15 4.2 Luigi Malago Linear regression methods (Ch 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 and 2.3.1, 2.4, 2.6 and 2.6.1, 2.7 and 2.7.1, 2.8 and 2.8.1, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 3.9, see paper "Least Angle Regression" linked below, pages 1-16)
29/03/2011 Tuesday 13:15 - 15:15 3.6 Matteo Matteucci Linear Discriminant Analysis (Ch. 4.3)
30/03/2011 Wednesday 14:15 - 16:15 4.2 Luigi Malago Linear regression methods (see 23/03/2011)
05/04/2011 Tuesday 13:15 - 15:15 3.6 Luigi Malago Linear regression methods (see 23/03/2011)
06/04/2011 Wednesday 14:15 - 16:15 4.2 Luigi Malago Linear regression methods (see 23/03/2011)
12/04/2011 Tuesday 13:15 - 15:15 3.6 Matteo Matteucci Logistic regression (Ch.4.4)
13/04/2011 Wednesday 14:15 - 16:15 4.2 Davide Eynard Clustering I: Introduction and K-Means
19/04/2011 Tuesday 13:15 - 15:15 3.6 Matteo Matteucci Perceptron learning
20/04/2011 Wednesday 14:15 - 16:15 4.2 Davide Eynard Clustering II: K-Means Alternatives, Hierarchical, SOM
27/04/2011 Wednesday 14:15 - 16:15 4.2 Davide Eynard Clustering III: Mixture of Gaussians, DBSCAN, Jarvis-Patrick
03/05/2011 Tuesday 13:15 - 15:15 3.6 Matteo Matteucci Maximum margin classification (Ch. 4.5.2)
04/05/2011 Wednesday 14:15 - 16:15 4.2 Davide Eynard Clustering IV: Evaluation Measures
10/05/2011 Tuesday 13:15 - 15:15 3.6 Matteo Matteucci Kernel Smoothing Methods and Kerned Density Estimation (Ch.6.1, Ch.6.6, Ch.6.9)
11/05/2011 Wednesday 14:15 - 16:15 4.2 Matteo Matteucci Gaussian Mixture Models (Ch.6.8) and the EM Algorithm (Ch.8.5)
17/05/2011 Tuesday No Lecture today!
18/05/2011 Wednesday No Lecture today!
24/05/2011 Tuesday 13:15 - 15:15 3.6 Matteo Matteucci Decision Trees (handout + Ch. 9.2)
25/05/2011 Wednesday 14:15 - 16:15 4.2 Matteo Matteucci Classification Rules (handout + Ch. 9.2)
31/05/2011 Tuesday 13:15 - 15:15 3.6 Matteo Matteucci Rule pruning and Sequential Covering Algorithm (handout + Ch. 9.3)
01/06/2011 Wednesday 14:15 - 16:15 4.2 Matteo Matteucci Sequential Covering Algorithm (handout + Ch. 9.3)
07/06/2011 Tuesday 13:15 - 15:15 3.6 Matteo Matteucci Support Vector Machines (Ch. 12.1, Ch. 12.2, Ch. 12.3.0, Ch. 12.3.1 + SVM paper)
08/06/2011 Wednesday No Lecture today!
14/06/2011 Tuesday 13:15 - 15:15 3.6 Matteo Matteucci Model selection theory (Ch. 7.1, Ch. 7.2, Ch. 7.3 + Bias and Variance notes)
15/06/2011 Wednesday 14:15 - 16:15 4.2 Matteo Matteucci Model selection practice (Ch. 7.4, Ch. 7.5, Ch. 7.6, Ch. 7.7, Ch. 7.10)
21/06/2011 Tuesday 13:15 - 15:15 3.6 Matteo Matteucci Question and Answers

Course Evaluation

The course evaluation is composed by two parts:

  • A homework with exercises covering the whole program that counts for 30% of the course grade
  • A oral examination covering the whole progran that count for 70% of the course grade

The homework is just one per year, it will be published at the end of the course and you will have 15 days to turn it in. It is not mandatory, however if you do not turn it in you loose 30% of the course grade. There is the option of substitute the homework with a practical project, but this has to be discussed and agreed with the course professor.

Teaching Material (the textbook)

Lectures will be based on material taken from the aforementioned slides and from the following book.

Some additional material that could be used to prepare the oral examination will be provided together with the past homeworks.

Teacher Slides

In the following you can find the lecture slides used by the teacher and the teaching assistants during classes:

  • Course introduction: introductory slides of the course with useful information about the grading, and the course logistics. Some examples from supervised learning and two algorithms for classification (taken from The Elements of Statistical Learning book).
  • Linear Classification Examples: slides presenting images, tables and examples about (generalized) linear methods for classification (taken from The Elements of Statistical Learning book).
  • Kernel Smoothing Examples: slides presenting images, tables and examples about Kernel Smoothing, Kernel Density Estimation and Gaussian Mixture Models (taken from The Elements of Statistical Learning book).
  • Decision Trees and Classification Rules: these slides have been used to present decision trees and decision rules complementing the material in Ch. 9.2 of the The Elements of Statistical Learning book.
  • Support Vector Machines: these slides have been used to present Support Vector Machines (taken from The Elements of Statistical Learning book).

Additional Papers

Papers used to integrate the textbook

Clustering Slides

These are the slides used to present clustering algorithms during lectures

  • Lesson 3: Mixture of Gaussians, DBSCAN, Jarvis-Patrick (slides, handouts)

Past Exams and Sample Questions

These are the text of past exams to give and idea on what to expect during the class exam:

2011 Homework

Here you can find the homework for the year 2011 and the material you need to complete it. Please read the F.A.Q. below and for any unsolved doubt contact the teachers of the course.

Frequently Asked Questions

  • How do I take the square root of a matrix?: check the diagonalization approach from [2].
  • How do I compute the chi square statistics?': in the slide there is a cut and paste error since e_ij=R_it*C_tj as described here [3]
  • When it is due? In which format?: The homework is due on the 29/06 and should be delivered by email. Send us (all the course teachers) the .m files in a zip archive attached to this email and a link to the pdf with the written part (not to flood our mailboxes).
  • Can we do that in groups? How many people per group?: Yes, you can work on the homework in groups, but no more than 3 people per group are allowed. Put the names of all homework authors in the pdf and in all the .m files. If you discuss something with other people, w.r.t. the people in your group, point it out in the pdf file as well.
  • Can we ask questions about the exercises or the code?: Yes you should! First of all, there might be unclear things in the exercise descriptions and those should be clarified as soon as possible for all (this is why the homework is versioned). But you could ask for help as well, our goal is to have you all solving all the questions and get a high grade ... but we will not do the homework on you behalf ;-)
  • How the optional questions are graded?: They compensate for possible errors in the other questions; we suggest to work on them anyway to be sure you get the maximum grading.
  • How the homework will be graded?: we are interested in understanding if you understood or not; thus we are not interested in the result, but we want to check how you get to the result. So please: 1) clarify all the assumptions and all the steps in your exercises 2) comment as much as possible your .m files!
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