CSE 515 - Statistical Methods in Computer Science

University of Washington Computer Science & Engineering

CSE 515 - Statistical Methods in Computer Science - Spring 2009

CSE Home

About Us

Contact Info

Instructor: Pedro Domingos
Office: Allen 648
Office hours: Wednesdays 3:30-4:30 and by appointment TA: Daniel Lowd
Office: Allen 216
Office hours: Mondays 2:30-3:30 and by appointment

Class meets:
Mondays and Wednesdays from 12:00 to 1:20 in JHN 175

Final exam:
8:30-10:20 a.m. Thursday, Jun. 11, 2009 in JHN 175

Schedule

Week	Dates	Topics & Lecture Notes	Readings
1	March 30, April 1	Introduction, basics of probability and statistical estimation	Ch. 1, 2 & 18
2	April 6 & 8	Mixture models and the EM algorithm (EM notes)	Ch. 20
3	April 13 & 15	Hidden Markov models and Kalman filters	Ch. 15
4	April 20 & 22	Bayesian networks and Markov networks	Ch. 3 - 5
5	April 27 & 29	Variable elimination, junction trees and belief propagation	Ch. 9 - 12
6	May 4 & 6	Sampling-based inference	Ch. 13
7	May 11 & 13	Learning Bayesian networks	Ch. 17 - 20
8	May 18 & 20	Learning Markov networks	Ch. 21
9	May 25 & 27	Dynamic Bayesian networks, particle filtering and relational models	Ch. 15 & 6
10	June 1 & 3	Decision theory and Markov decision processes (updated)	Ch. 23 & 24

Textbook

D. Koller & N. Friedman, Structured Probabilistic Models: Principles and Techniques, MIT Press (required).
This book has not been published yet; a reader will be available at the University Bookstore.

Assignments

There will be four homework assignments, each worth 15% of the final grade, and a final exam, worth 40%. The homeworks include programming. Homework assignments will be handed out on weeks 1, 3, 5 and 7, and will be due two weeks later.

(Assignments will be posted here once they are ready.)

Assignment 1, due at noon on April 15th.
Data: wine.train, wine.test, wine.true.
See also: Wine dataset at the UCI Machine learning repository
Assignment 2 (revised 4/20/09), due in class on April 29th.
Assignment 3, due in class on May 13th; BP implementation and write-up turned in to lowd at cs by 11:59pm on May 15th.
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 by email to lowd at cs on May 29th, at 11:59pm.
Final Exam: 8:30-10:20 a.m. Thursday, Jun. 11, 2009 in JHN 175

Course Administration and Policies

Subscribe to the course mailing list.
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.
Assignments may be handed in up to a week late, at a penalty of 10% of the maximum grade per day.
Comments can be sent to the instructor or TA using this anonymous feedback form

Computer Science & Engineering
University of Washington
Box 352350
Seattle, WA 98195-2350
(206) 543-1695 voice, (206) 543-2969 FAX
[comments to lowd]