IIT Madras Offers Free Online Course on Introduction to Machine Learning for Students

IIT Madras has invited applications for a free online course called Introduction to Machine Learning on the NPTEL platform. The course, which is AICTE FDP approved, can be taken by senior undergraduate or postgraduate students pursuing their BE, MS, ME or even PhD. The course is 12 weeks long and will be conducted from 26 July to 15 October 2021. It would be most beneficial for students pursuing education in the domains of computer science and engineering, artificial intelligence, data science, programming and robotics.

The course will be conducted by professor Balaraman Ravindran who is associated with the department of computer science at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and is also a Mindtree Faculty Fellow. The professor has two decades of experience in machine learning and reinforcement learning. He is currently working in the areas of data mining, social network analysis, and reinforcement learning.

What the IIT Madras Free Online Course on Machine Learning Will Cover

Participants of the course will be introduced to some of the basic concepts of machine learning from a mathematically well-motivated perspective. Furthermore, the different learning paradigms and some of the more popular algorithms and architectures used in each of these paradigms will also be covered as part of the course. Some of the topics that students will get to learn are as follows:

• Probability theory, linear algebra, and convex optimization.
• Introduction: Statistical decision theory, regression, classification, and bias variance.
• Linear regression, multivariate regression, subset selection, shrinkage methods, principal component regression, and partial least squares.
• Linear classification, logistic regression, and linear discriminant analysis.
• Perceptron, and support vector machines.
• Neural Networks: Introduction, early models, perceptron learning, backpropagation, initialization, training and validation, parameter estimation, MLE, MAP, and Bayesian estimation.
• Decision trees, regression trees, stopping criterion and pruning loss functions, categorical attributes, multiway splits, missing values, decision trees, and instability evaluation measures.
• Bootstrapping and cross validation, class evaluation measures, ROC curve, MDL, ensemble methods - bagging, committee machines and stacking, boosting, and much more.

How to Enroll and Other Important Details

Interested students will have to enroll in the course before 15 October 2021. The course is free to enroll and learn from; however, those who require certificates will have to pay Rs 1000 and take an examination that will be conducted on 24 October 2021. Interested participants may enroll for the course on the official page by using their Facebook, Microsoft, Google or Facebook accounts.