Machine Learning Foundations: A Case Study Approach

Machine learning is everywhere, but is often operating behind the scenes. <p>This introduction to the specialization provides you with insights into the power of machine learning, and the multitude of intelligent applications you personally will be able to develop and deploy upon completion.</p>We also discuss who we are, how we got here, and our view of the future of intelligent applications.

This week you will build your first intelligent application that makes predictions from data.<p>We will explore this idea within the context of our first case study, predicting house prices, where you will create models that predict a continuous value (price) from input features (square footage, number of bedrooms and bathrooms,...). <p>This is just one of the many places where regression can be applied.Other applications range from predicting health outcomes in medicine, stock prices in finance, and power usage in high-performance computing, to analyzing which regulators are important for gene expression.</p>You will also examine how to analyze the performance of your predictive model and implement regression in practice using an iPython notebook.

How do you guess whether a person felt positively or negatively about an experience, just from a short review they wrote?<p>In our second case study, analyzing sentiment, you will create models that predict a class (positive/negative sentiment) from input features (text of the reviews, user profile information,...).This task is an example of classification, one of the most widely used areas of machine learning, with a broad array of applications, including ad targeting, spam detection, medical diagnosis and image classification.</p>You will analyze the accuracy of your classifier, implement an actual classifier in an iPython notebook, and take a first stab at a core piece of the intelligent application you will build and deploy in your capstone.

A reader is interested in a specific news article and you want to find a similar articles to recommend. What is the right notion of similarity? How do I automatically search over documents to find the one that is most similar? How do I quantitatively represent the documents in the first place?<p>In this third case study, retrieving documents, you will examine various document representations and an algorithm to retrieve the most similar subset. You will also consider structured representations of the documents that automatically group articles by similarity (e.g., document topic).</p>You will actually build an intelligent document retrieval system for Wikipedia entries in an iPython notebook.