CSE 515 - Statistical Methods in Computer Science

University of Washington Computer Science & Engineering

CSE 515 - Statistical Methods in Computer Science - Winter 2015

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About Us

Contact Info

Instructor: Pedro Domingos
Office: Allen 648
Office hours: Wednesdays 11am-11:50am and by appointment TA: Chloe Kiddon
Office: Allen 218
Office hours: Mondays 2:30pm-3:20pm and by appointment

Class meets:
Mondays and Wednesdays from 12:00 to 1:20 in MGH 251

Schedule

Week	Dates	Topics & Lecture Notes	Readings
1	January 5 & 7	Introduction, basics of probability and statistical estimation	Ch. 1, 2 & 17
2	January 12 & 14	Mixture models and the EM algorithm (EM notes)	Ch. 19
3	January 21 (no class Jan. 19)	Hidden Markov models and Kalman filters	Ch. 6 (Sec. 6.1 & 6.2) & Ch. 15 (Sec. 15.4.1)
4	January 26 & 28	Bayesian networks and Markov networks	Ch. 3 & 4
5	February 2 & 4	Variable elimination, junction trees and belief propagation	Ch. 9 - 11
6	February 9 & 11	Sampling-based inference	Ch. 12
7	February 18 (no class Feb. 16)	Learning Bayesian networks	Ch. 16 - 18
8	February 23 & 25	Learning Markov networks	Ch. 20
9	March 2 & 4	Dynamic Bayesian networks, particle filtering and relational models	Ch. 15 (Sec. 15.1 - 15.3) & Ch. 6 (Sec. 6.3 & 6.4)
10	March 9 & 11	Decision theory and Markov decision processes	Ch. 22 & 23

Textbook

D. Koller & N. Friedman, Probabilistic Graphical Models: Principles and Techniques, MIT Press (required).

Assignments

There will be four homework assignments, each worth 25% of the final grade. The homeworks include programming. Homework assignments will be handed out on weeks 2, 4, 6, 8, and will be due two weeks later.

(Assignments will be posted here once they are ready.)

Assignment 1, due at noon on January 28th.
Data: wine.train, wine.test, wine.true.
See also: Wine dataset at the UCI Machine learning repository
Assignment 2, due at noon on February 11th.
Assignment 3, due at noon on February 25th.
Supplementary files: hw3-dist.zip (including skeleton code, .BIF files, the VFML library, and scripts).
See Kschischang et al. for a detailed explanation of BP.
Assignment 4, due at noon on March 11th.

Course Administration and Policies

Subscribe to the course mailing list.
Assignments will be done individually unless otherwise specified. You may discuss the subject matter with other students in the class, but all final answers must be your own work. You are expected to maintain the utmost level of academic integrity in the course.
Assignments may be handed in up to a week late, at a penalty of 10% of the maximum grade per day.
Discuss course material on the forum.
Comments can be sent to the instructor or TA using this anonymous feedback form

Computer Science & Engineering
University of Washington
Box 352350
Seattle, WA 98195-2350
(206) 543-1695 voice, (206) 543-2969 FAX
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