Steam-powered Turing Machine University of Washington Computer Science & Engineering
 CSE 515 - Statistical Methods in Computer Science - Winter 2015
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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.)

Course Administration and Policies


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