Weekly update for week 45

Good morning everybody!  I hope all is well!

This week we continue our discussion of decision trees and random forests, with a repetition of support vector machines well. 

Decision trees are discussed in Hastie et al in chapters 9 and 10 (the discussion is somewhat scattered) and Geron chapters 6 and 7. 

This will more or less conclude our part on supervised learning from a frequentist's approach.

Next week Nils Hjort (not a minimization of my last name) will teach about Bayesian statistics.

Nils is a great teacher and I hope you'll enjoy his lectures. He is one of the leading experts on Bayesian statistics.  The department of mathematics offers an advanced course on Bayesian statistics for those of you who might be interested, see /studier/emner/matnat/math/STK4021/index-eng.html

This is a great and interesting topic and forms an important element of modern machine learning

from a probabilistic point of view. The aim is to extract a probability distribution from machine learning algorithms. 

The week thereafter and the final week we will discuss some unsupervised learning methods, in particular how to use Boltzmann machines to solve problems. 

The final week (week 48) seems somewhat tricky since most of you seem to have exams from Tuesday the 27th till Friday the 30th. I have still not  given up the idea of a final workshop, but it seems that the last week (week 48, November 26-30) is just clogged with exams. 

I will come back to a discussion of project 3 on Friday. In the meantime, please feel free to suggest topics by the Friday the 9th. 

Best wishes to you all,

Morten