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Assignments

The three assignments are carried out individually and are examined orally.

You can now book a time for presentation of Assignment 1 April 20 through this Doodle.

You can also book a time for presentation of Assignment 2 April 20 through this Doodle. To present, you first have to submit a report by Sunday April 19, 12.00 NOON ECT, according to the instructions in the Assignment 2 description.

You can also book a time for presentation of Assignment 3 April 20 through this Doodle. To present, you first have to submit a report by Sunday April 19, 12.00 NOON ECT, according to the instructions in the Assignment 3 description.

Grading

Each assignment is graded as A-F(fail) at the oral exam. In the case of F, the assignment has to be presented again at a later time. The grade depends on how large part of the assigment that was carried out correctly - this is specified on each assigment description. The grade is also affected by delays in the presentation of the assignment. The tables below show how the grades for assignment 1, 2, and 3 decays over time. "Grade Assignment X" corresponds to the grade according to the specification on the assignment description:

Oral Exam by the Latest November 28 January 14 April 20 (hard deadline)
-- --
Grade Assignment 1
A A B C D E
B B C D E E
C C D E E E
D D E E E E
E E E E E E
Oral Exam by the Latest December 3 January 7 February 3 March 3 April 20 (hard deadline)
Grade Assignment 2
A A B C D E
B B C D E E
C C D E E E
D D E E E E
E E E E E E
Oral Exam by the Latest
December 17 January 20 February 17 March 17 April 20 (hard deadline)
Grade Assignment 3
A A B C D E
B B C D E E
C C D E E E
D D E E E E
E E E E E E

In other words: Be on time with the assignments! The first date of each exam is scheduled; to present before any of the later deadlines for each exam, please make an individual appointment with the responsible teacher (Jens Lagergren for 1, Carl Henrik Ek for 2, Hedvig Kjellström for 3) well in advance.

The grades on the individual assignments are weighted together in a robust manner, as the mean  (rounded upwards) of the 2 individual assignments with the highest grade. NOTE: You still need to pass all three assignments, i.e., get at least grade E on all three assignments.

Assignment GradeCriteria (2 highest individual assignment grades, regardless of order)
A (A,A), (A,B)
B (A,C), (A,D), (B,B), (B,C)
C (A,E), (B,D), (B,E), (C,C), (C,D)
D (C,E), (D,D), (D,E)
E (E,E)

Lärare Hedvig Kjellström skapade sidan 2 november 2014

Hedvig Kjellström flyttade sidan från Machine Learning, Advanced Course (DD2434) 2 november 2014

kommenterade 13 november 2014

Do you plan to schedule help sessions? A lot of us have problems with the assignment which cannot be solved in the lecture breaks.

Lärare kommenterade 13 november 2014

No help sessions are scheduled. Questions about the assignments are posed in the News (News in the menu to the left) feed of this homepage, so that all students can see the answers. If you need more help, contact the responsible teacher (Jens for Assignment 1). Best, /Hedvig

kommenterade 13 november 2014

I've signed up to have the first assignment examined on the 28th, but I just discovered that almost all of the times (including mine) coincide with the lecture 7 and 8 exercise session with Carl Henrik, which I'd rather not miss, if possible.

Lärare kommenterade 13 november 2014

Too many cooks are working on the schedule... :)

Information to everyone: We have now added more times on Wednesday Nov 26, so that you can change your bookings from 15-17 on Friday Nov 28!

kommenterade 21 november 2014

While this page clearly states the deadline for assignment 1 to be the 28th, the assignment .pdf says it's the 25th. While I assume this page has the correct date, I'd still like to double check; which date is correct?

Lärare kommenterade 21 november 2014

The deadline is Friday the 28 of November, the date in the assignment is wrong since I forgot to update it. Best, Hedvig

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kommenterade 28 november 2014

Just a small question, In the description for assignment2 the following text is written “These grades are valid for review December 9, 2014.”, but now when the doodle is up, the review is on December 4 and 5?

Lärare kommenterade 28 november 2014

This is an old formulation - sorry about that.

The correct deadline is listed higher up in the same boxed text on the front page: hand in the report before noon Dec 3, present the report orally on Dec 4 or 5 (book a time).

Best,

/Hedvig

kommenterade 28 november 2014

That's a pretty tight deadline. It would've been great to have more time to work on this assignement (as some of us have 3 or 4 classes in parallel).

Lärare kommenterade 28 november 2014

You have known about this deadline since the start of the course, and have had time to work on the assignment since November 19. We were careful to point out already in the first lecture that you should work on Assignments 1 and 2 in parallel as the time was short.

But since many students have spent more time than intended on Assignment 1, and have a tight schedule for Assignment 2, we have loosened the grading criteria, see other post in the news feed!

Best,

/Hedvig

kommenterade 29 november 2014

I believe there is a minor mistake in Assignment 2 eqn. 23:

$$p(\textbf{Y} \mid \textbf{W}) = \int p(\textbf{Y} \mid \textbf{X}, \textbf{W}) d\textbf{X}$$

since this is not true in general. I assume it should be:

$$p(\textbf{Y} \mid \textbf{W}) = \int p(\textbf{Y} \mid \textbf{X}, \textbf{W})p(\textbf{X}) d\textbf{X}$$

because of independence between \(\textbf{X}\) and \(\textbf{W}\).

Lärare kommenterade 30 november 2014

Yes, well spotted. There should be a multiplication with p(X) inside the integration, i.e. your second expression is the one that is correct.

Lärare kommenterade 3 december 2014

There are 52 people signed up for presentation tomorrow but I have only received 38 reports. Could the ones who do not intend to present assignment 2 please remove themselves from the Doodle.

Lärare kommenterade 4 december 2014

If there is anyone that doesn't have access to the building where the presentation takes place tonight, please give me a call on 0702-505064 and I'll come and open the door for you.

kommenterade 6 december 2014

Is there anyone in the course that would like to discuss Assignment 2 more in depth?

kommenterade 7 december 2014

This is probably a bit premature, but I have a question about Adaboost in assignment 3:
If at any iteration of the adaboost algorithm, we get an error rate of 0.5 for the best weak learner we can find, alpha will be nil ( 0.5 * log ( (1 - 0.5) / 0.5 ) ) -> the weights won't be updated anymore (exp(-alpha) == exp(alpha) == 1) and we'll be stuck with the same classifier/weights for the rest of the algorithm.
Is there anything we can do to avoid this case?

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Lärare kommenterade 12 december 2014

the files *Test.txt contain just test points, 100 per dataset.

kommenterade 14 december 2014

I don't know about you but I found the boundary equation to be quite cryptic and spent a good hour or two in vain just trying to interpret the ambiguous notation. It's a parametric curve, in other words a sequence of x,y (cartesian) coordinates to be plotted, this is the notation we had for this in my multivariable calculus that is less ambiguous.

$$b=\left[ \begin{array}{c} x \\ y \end{array} \right]=\left[ \begin{array}{c} t\cos \left( \mbox{abs}\left( t\pi \right) \right) \\ t\sin \left( \mbox{abs}\left( t\pi \right) \right) \end{array} \right],\; t=-1...1$$

(In this case t can be considered to be the r of a polar coordinate system but that was just messing with my head so I figured t actually makes more sense. In polar coordinates the formula would need to generate two angles for every r (corresponding to πr and πr-π).)

kommenterade 14 december 2014

This is exactly the formula we have in the assignement by replacing alpha by its (new) value.

r[cos(abs(α)), sin(abs(α))] where the radius r [1, 1] and the angle α = πr

kommenterade 14 december 2014

Not quite, the formula in the assignment gives no info on the coordinate system used. It also uses square brackets that are often used as normal brackets to emphasize which pairs go together. To someone who has perhaps never studied multi variable calculus (current computer scientist bachelors at KTH don't and it is not a prerequisite for this course or any before it) or saw these things last 2-3 years ago notation like this is a very unnecessary confusion.

I guess this is really the hint I'm trying to give here. There are a lot of very overwhelmed ppl in this course and I believe a lot of it is due to non-optimal and unnecessarily complex notation being used to communicate simple concepts.

Lärare kommenterade 14 december 2014

No it does not indeed say "polar coordinates" explicitly, but after the calculus course, you could infer that when we talk about a "radius" and an "angle".

Lärare kommenterade 14 december 2014

Or is it the case that you have never met polar coordinates - nor in high school, or in the intro math, algebra, calculus or some physics course??? In that case we will definitely revise the prerequisites for this course...

I am aware that this course is mathematically heavy. But the subject of Machine Learning is mathematically heavy! And it is indeed important to formalize things. Most concepts are intuitive and simple, but to be able to move from, e.g., 3D to 10000D and understand what will happen, one must make things rigorous and provable.

We are not trying to mess with you, we are teaching you the foundations you need to know in order to develop efficient and robust ML algorithms for new problems.

kommenterade 14 december 2014

I believe a few may indeed never have come across polar coordinates. My first and last encounter with them were in the multivariable calculus course at KTH two years ago. And yes, I definitely think you should at least heavily recommend that course as a prerequisite for this. I would like to see the student who manages to do the derivations in assignment 2 individually in just over a week without having done that first.

Rigidity and provability are indeed noble pursuits of this course but I believe its ability of conveying this to all students is reduced by notation quality and inconsistency. Like you said, ML can be incredibly math heavy which makes it all the more important that this math is extremely well presented. Extremely pedagogically presented. I believe the ML community is currently failing in this aspect as it is a mixture of probability math and linear algebra, which are using similar notations for different semantics. (Take \(\bar{x}\), does it mean average or vector? Or both? And X vs x. Is X a matrix or a stochastic variable? And so on...) This is on top of the already lacking mathematical notation. In software engineering this has been realized and abbreviated or non-descriptive variable names are very much frowned upon. In math single character variables is the norm. There are valid reasons for this but that does not mean a software engineer will not rightfully frown heavily when he is unable to take in a lecture due to his inability to remember what x, y and z stood for this time. Or has to spend 2 hours on deciphering a simple boundary function that should've gone into understanding the finer workings of difficult ML math.

I do realize you're not trying to mess with me. I also realize it's the first time you hold this course and things will be far from perfect. But for this very reason I also believe it's important that you get these accounts of where your students are coming from (very different places if you compare a technical physics student with a computer science one). And although I don't believe you're trying to mess with anyone I sometimes get the feeling that you are mistaking your students who are doing this for the first time with your research colleagues who work with it all day long. 

Lärare kommenterade 14 december 2014

Thanks for this input! We are indeed going to evaluate and analyze the course thoroughly, and figure out how to change it in order to make the learning as effective as possible. We will have a student evaluation form with open questions, and I urge you (and all other students!) to fill it out. If it does not cover all that you would like to feedback, feel free to send me email.

One of the things we will certainly do is to set multivariate calculus as a prerequisite for the course. We will also make clear that the statistics course is very important to have in fresh memory, and that it does not hurt to take an optimization course beforehand.

We will also point out that this course is more mathematical in nature than most computer science courses, which means that computer science majors will need to put down a larger effort in preparing for lectures etc than, for example, engineering physics majors.

kommenterade 14 december 2014

Oh and what you should say about that boundary function is that it is a parametrized function in Cartesian coordinates. The polar coordinate references are just confusing, one does not need to know anything of polar coordinates to implement that function.

kommenterade 14 december 2014

Awesome. To make things clear I do get the feeling from that you guys are trying to make this an excellent course. Just wanted you to put some extra thought into notation and making things clear enough that it can be effortlessly understood even by your average CS-student who's spent the last year doing nothing but scrum and HCI... maybe. Thanks for all the effort!

Lärare kommenterade 14 december 2014

Thanks for the kind words.

Sadly, it is not possible to take this course effortlessly if you have not sufficient background in math. But we will indeed make that clear in the prerequisites!

Lärare kommenterade 5 april 2015

You can now book times for presentation of the assignments, see the Assignments page. Note that this is the last possibility of presenting assignments this year. If you miss this deadline, you will have to redo the entire series of assignments next year, as we will change the order of the different topics in the assignments.

Take this chance to finish the assignments! We look forward to seeing your solutions!

All the best,

/Hedvig

kommenterade 19 april 2015

Hello,

Is it possible to a spot on tomorrow. Although the doodle is full?

Eric

kommenterade 19 april 2015

I am talking about assignment 1

Lärare kommenterade 19 april 2015

I will add a time, it will be right after the current ones and will appear before 22 tonoght

Lärare Hedvig Kjellström ändrade rättigheterna 14 september 2015

Kan därmed läsas av alla och ändras av lärare.