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by samwgoldman 3851 days ago
I haven't taken many online courses, but here are my favorites (notice a trend):

Andrew Ng's ML Class - This makes the list because it is incredibly useful. I didn't have much background in the field and this class is a practical survey of ideas. Not a ton of depth, but exposes you to a lot of information gently.

Daphne Koller's PGM Class - This was the most rewarding. I banged my head on a lot of this material, but it was an incredible feeling when things started to click. That I was able to complete this class is a testament to Dr. Koller's excellence as an educator.

Dan Jurafsky's and Christopher Manning's NLP Class - This class was the most fun. I thought the exercises were incredibly well designed. Unlike the first two courses, the exercises were a lot more interesting. For ML and PGM, you mostly know when you have the answer and you are rewarded with 100%. NLP assignments are based on how well your system generalizes, which made me try harder to improve my systems, and helped me enjoy the course.

5 comments

Links,

Andrew Ng's ML Class - https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning

Daphne Koller's PGM Class - https://www.coursera.org/course/pgm

Dan Jurafsky's and Christopher Manning's NLP Class - https://www.coursera.org/course/nlp

Koller's PGM was fun but very hard to generalize outside of the problems presented in the class. Opportunities to implement loopy belief propagation just don't seem to come up as much ad I'd like.
That's because most were toy examples dealing with discrete distributions in a few dimensions. Granted, these are mathematically easier to deal with, but not representative of real-world scenarios.
NLP has been on my watchlist for a semester now. No word on when future sessions will happen. I'm about to give up on that and just watch the old videos. Too bad I won't get the assignments :/
Can't you still do the old assignments?
Wow, that PGM course looks exactly like what I need to get my head around GMs! I'm using Andrew Ng's class to support my learning for my MSc in Data Science, and it's been an invaluable resource. There is nothing like hearing the same material explained by different people to really hammer the topics home, I'm looking forward to getting stuck into that PGM course.

Thanks for these!

FYI, the current session of Andrew Ng's ML class starts today.