Schedule of classes (first half of semester)

MCS 394: Topics in CS
Karl Knight, Spring 2000

Following is the tentative schedule of classes and labs before Spring Break, roughly the first half of the semester.

DateReadingTopicDue
2/7 Overview of the course
2/9 Chap 1 Introduction to machine learning
2/11 Chap 1 More general comments on machine learning

2/14 Discussion of LMS homework project
2/16 More discussion of project
2/18 Sect. 2.1-2.4 Introduction to concept learning; Find-S algorithm

2/21 2.5-2.8 Version spaces, candidate elimination, and inductive hypotheses
2/23 3.1-3.4.1.1 Decision trees as hypotheses; basic ID3 algorithm for concept learning
2/25 Finish 3.4 Entropy and information gain; a closer look at ID3

2/28 3.5-3.6 Hypothesis space search and inductive bias in decision tree learning Lab #1
3/1 3.7 Lab day
3/3 4.1-4.4 Introduction to artificial neural networks; perceptrons Homework #1

3/6 4.4 Delta training rule for Perceprtons
3/8 Lab day
3/10 4.5 Multi-layer networks and back-propogation

3/13 4.5 More about back-propogation Lab #2
3/15 4.7 An illustrative example: face recognition
3/17 Lab day

3/20 4.6 & 4.8 Yet more about back-propogation; advanced topics in ANN
3/22 9-9.3 Genetic algorithms with an illustrative example
3/24 Another example application of genetic algorithms Lab #4