Applied Machine Learning
(CS 441) – Fall 2025
  HW 1 – Instance-based Methods (Sep 15)HW 2 – PCA and Linear Models (Sep 29)HW 3 – PDFs and Outliers (Oct 13)HW
  4 – Trees and MLPs (Nov 3)
  HW
  5 – Deep Learning and Applications (Nov 17)
  Final
  Project (Dec 14)
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  Class Schedule   (subject to change)
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   Date  | 
  
   Topic  | 
  
   Link  | 
  
   Reading/Notes  | 
 
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   Aug 26 (Tues)  | 
  
   Introduction  | 
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   Fundamentals of Learning  | 
  
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   Aug 28 (Thurs)  | 
  
   K-NN Classification, Data Representation  | 
  
   AML Ch 1.1-1.2  | 
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   Sep 2 (Tues)  | 
  
   K-NN Regression, Generalization  | 
  
   AML Ch 1.1-1.2  | 
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   Sep 4 (Thurs)  | 
  
   Search and Clustering  | 
  
   AML Ch 8  | 
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   Sep 8 (Mon)  | 
  
   Probability/Background
  Review (live
  zoom session 9-10pm)  | 
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   Sep 9 (Tues)  | 
  
   Dimensionality reduction: PCA, embeddings  | 
  
   AML Ch 5, 6, 19  | 
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   Sep 11 (Thurs)  | 
  
   Linear regression, regularization  | 
  
    AML Ch 10-11  | 
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   Sep 15 (Mon)  | 
  
   HW 1 (Instance-based Methods) due  | 
  
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   Sep 16 (Tues)  | 
  
   Linear classifiers: logistic regression, SVM  | 
  
   AML Ch 11.3, 2.1  | 
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   Sep 18 (Thurs)  | 
  
   Naïve Bayes Classifier  | 
  
   AML Ch 2  | 
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   Sep 23 (Tues)  | 
  
   EM and Latent Variables  | 
  
   AML Ch 9  | 
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   Sep 25 (Thurs)  | 
  
   Density estimation: MoG, Hists, KDE  | 
  
   AML Ch 9  | 
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   Sep 29 (Mon)  | 
  
   HW 2 (PCA and Linear
  Models) due  | 
  
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   Sep 30 (Tues)  | 
  
   Outliers and Robust
  Estimation  | 
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   Oct 2-5  | 
  
   Exam 1 at CBTF  Optional review on Oct 2 in
  lecture  | 
  
   pdf
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   Oct 7 (Tues)  | 
  
   Decision Trees  | 
  
   AML Ch 2  | 
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   Oct 9 (Thurs)  | 
  
   Ensembles and Random Forests  | 
  
   AML Ch 2  | 
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   Deep Learning  | 
  
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   Oct
  13 (Mon)  | 
  
   HW 3 (PDFs and Outliers)  | 
  
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   Oct 14 (Tues)  | 
  
   Stochastic Gradient Descent  | 
  
   AML Ch 2.1; Pegasos
  (Shalev-Shwartz et al. 2007)  | 
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   Oct 16 (Thurs)  | 
  
   MLPs and Backprop  | 
  
   AML 16  | 
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   Oct 21 (Tues)  | 
  
   CNNs and Keys to Deep Learning  | 
  
   AML Ch 17-18, ResNet (He et al. 2016)  | 
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   Oct 23 (Thurs)  | 
  
   Deep Learning Optimization and Computer Vision  | 
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   Oct 28 (Tues)  | 
  
   Words and Attention  | 
  
   Sub-word Tokenization (Sennrich
  et al. 2016) Word2Vec (Mikolov et al. 2013) Attention is all you need
  (Vaswani et al. 2017)  | 
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   Oct 30 (Thurs)  | 
  
   Transformers in Language and Vision  | 
  
   BERT (Devlin et al. 2019) ViT (Dosovitskiy et al. 2021) Unified-IO (Lu et al. 2022)  | 
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   Nov 3
  (Mon)  | 
  
   HW 4 (Trees and MLPs) due  | 
  
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   Nov 4 (Tues)  | 
  
   Foundation Models: CLIP and GPT  | 
  
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   CLIP (Radford et al. 2021)  | 
 
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   Nov 6-9  | 
  
   Exam 2 at CBTF
  (Optional review on Nov 6)  | 
  
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   Applications   | 
  
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   Nov 11 (Tues)  | 
  
   Ethics and Impact of AI  | 
  
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   Nov 13 (Thurs)  | 
  
   Bias in AI, Fair ML  | 
  
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   Nov 14 (Fri)  | 
  
   Final Project Planning Form
  due  | 
  
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   See CampusWire post #207  | 
 
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   Nov 17 (Mon)  | 
  
   HW 5 (Deep Learning and
  Applications) due  | 
  
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   Nov 18 (Tues)  | 
  
   Audio and 1D Signals  | 
  
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   Nov 20 (Thurs)  | 
  
   Building and Deploying ML Guest speaker: Chenxi
  Yu (State Farm)  | 
  
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   (no slides)  | 
 
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   Nov 22-Nov 30  | 
  
   Fall Break  | 
  
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   Dec 2 (Tues)  | 
  
   Reinforcement Learning  | 
  
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   Dec 4 (Thurs)  | 
  
   Review, summary, looking
  forward   | 
  
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   Dec 4-9  | 
  
   Exam 3 at CBTF  | 
  
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   Dec 14 (Sun)  | 
  
   Final Project due (cannot be late)  | 
  
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