CS 539: Machine Learning :: Summer 2025

Primary Textbook is

• (Flach) Machine Learning: The Art and Science of Algorithms That Make Sense of Data by Peter Flach, Cambridge University Press.

Additional course readings will be drawn from the following textbooks:

• (LfD) Learning From Data by Y. S. Abu-Mostafa, M. Magdon-Ismail, and H.T. Lin., AML Book
• (Mitchell) Machine Learning by Tom Mitchell, McGraw Hill
• Machine Learning Lecture Notes by Andrew Ng
• (Sutton & Barto) Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction by Sutton and Barto, MIT Press
• (DLP) Deep Learning with Python by François Chollet, Manning Publications
• Selected Research Papers

Tentative Schedule (subject to change)

Week #	Date	Topic	Readings	Homework	Quiz	Project
1	5/27	Course overview & Machine Learning, Framing a Learning Problem; Supervised Learning & Decision Trees	Flach: Prologue & Ch. 1, The Discipline of Machine Learning; Mitchell: Ch. 3
2	6/3	Decision Trees & Overfitting, Evaluation, Linear Regression; Gradient Descent	Flach: 2.1-3.2, LfD: 1.1,3.2.1, Flach: 7.1, Optional linear algebra review	HW1 out		Form a team by June 10
3	6/10	Linear Regression; Regularization,	Flach: 7.1 Basis functions LfD: 3.3	HW2 out	Quiz1
4	6/17	Logistic Regression; Evaluation; Neural Network	LfD: 2, 3.2.2, Learning Theory Notes Deep Learning Backpropagation http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/chap2.html
5	6/24	Deep Learning	DLP: 5.1; Convolutional Neural Networks	HW3 out	Quiz2
6	7/1	Deep Learning	DLP: 6.2			Proposal due by July 1
7	7/8	Support Vector Machines Ensemble Methods;	Flach: 7.3, LfD: 8 Flach: 7.5, Bennett Flach: 11	HW4 out
8	7/15	Naive Bayes; Text Classification; Word Vectors; Unsupervised Learning:  K-Means; GMMs;	Generative Model Notes Flach: 9.1, 9.2 Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality k-means clustering Flach 8.4 Mixture of Gaussians		Quiz3
9	7/22	Markov Decision Process; Reinforcement Learning;	Sutton & Barto: Ch. 3, Ch. 4, Ch. 6, RL notes
10	7/29	Transfer Learning; Distillation; Project Presentation (live session)			Quiz4 (7/29~7/30)	Website and Slides due by July 29 Peer & Self Evaluation Form by July 30