CSE 515 - Statistical Methods in Computer Science

University of Washington Computer Science & Engineering

CSE 515 - Statistical Methods in Computer Science - Winter 2017

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About Us

Contact Info

Instructor: Pedro Domingos
Office: Allen 648
Office hours: Thursdays 10:00am-10:50am and by appointment TA: Alon Milchgrub
Office: Allen 220
Office hours: Tuesdays 10:00am-10:50am and by appointment

Class meets:
Tuesdays and Thursdays from 11:00 to 12:20 in EEB 003

Schedule

Week	Dates	Topics & Lecture Notes	Readings
1	January 3 & 5	Introduction, basics of probability and statistical estimation	Ch. 1, 2 & 17
2	January 10 & 12	Mixture models and the EM algorithm (EM notes)	Ch. 19
3	January 17 & 19	Hidden Markov models and Kalman filters	Ch. 6 (Sec. 6.1 & 6.2) & Ch. 15 (Sec. 15.4.1)
4	January 24 & 26	Bayesian networks and Markov networks	Ch. 3 & 4
5	January 31 & February 2	Variable elimination, junction trees and belief propagation	Ch. 9 - 11
6	February 7 & 9	Sampling-based inference	Ch. 12
7	February 14 & 16	Learning Bayesian networks	Ch. 16 - 18
8	February 21 & 23	Learning Markov networks	Ch. 20
9	February 28 & March 2	Dynamic Bayesian networks, particle filtering and relational models	Ch. 15 (Sec. 15.1 - 15.3) & Ch. 6 (Sec. 6.3 & 6.4)
10	March 7 & 9	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 11am on January 26th.
Data: wine.train, wine.test, wine-true.train.
See also: Wine dataset at the UCI Machine learning repository
Assignment 2, due at 11 am on February 9th.
Data and code: Package.zip
Assignment 3, due at 11 am on February 23th.
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 11 am on March 9th.

Course Administration and Policies

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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.
Dropbox to turn in homework.
Gradebook
Assignments may be handed in up to a week late, at a penalty of 10% of the maximum grade per day.
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Computer Science & Engineering
University of Washington
Box 352350
Seattle, WA 98195-2350
(206) 543-1695 voice, (206) 543-2969 FAX