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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Mathematics for Machine Learning: PCA by Imperial College London

4.0
stars
3,098 ratings

About the Course

This intermediate-level course introduces the mathematical foundations to derive Principal Component Analysis (PCA), a fundamental dimensionality reduction technique. We'll cover some basic statistics of data sets, such as mean values and variances, we'll compute distances and angles between vectors using inner products and derive orthogonal projections of data onto lower-dimensional subspaces. Using all these tools, we'll then derive PCA as a method that minimizes the average squared reconstruction error between data points and their reconstruction. At the end of this course, you'll be familiar with important mathematical concepts and you can implement PCA all by yourself. If you’re struggling, you'll find a set of jupyter notebooks that will allow you to explore properties of the techniques and walk you through what you need to do to get on track. If you are already an expert, this course may refresh some of your knowledge. The lectures, examples and exercises require: 1. Some ability of abstract thinking 2. Good background in linear algebra (e.g., matrix and vector algebra, linear independence, basis) 3. Basic background in multivariate calculus (e.g., partial derivatives, basic optimization) 4. Basic knowledge in python programming and numpy Disclaimer: This course is substantially more abstract and requires more programming than the other two courses of the specialization. However, this type of abstract thinking, algebraic manipulation and programming is necessary if you want to understand and develop machine learning algorithms....

Top reviews

WS

Jul 6, 2021

Now i feel confident about pursuing machine learning courses in the future as I have learned most of the mathematics which will be helpful in building the base for machine learning, data science.

JS

Jul 16, 2018

This is one hell of an inspiring course that demystified the difficult concepts and math behind PCA. Excellent instructors in imparting the these knowledge with easy-to-understand illustrations.

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451 - 475 of 773 Reviews for Mathematics for Machine Learning: PCA

By Kisan T

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Jun 16, 2020

Great Course but not good as previous two courses. It helps me gather great idea about Principle Component Analysis. Thanks to Coursera, Imperial College London, and Professors for this amazing course and specialization.

By sujith

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Sep 27, 2018

This is a great course. It covers the topic in good amount of detail. I have enjoyed this course a lot and it also made me think deeper at a lot of places. I am motivated to go and do more work on related topics now.

By João M G

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Aug 14, 2019

The course was great till the final week. The lectures did not explain very well the concepts and the assignment was poorly designed. It's a shame because I've loved the more rigorous way of this final course.

By 张冉

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Aug 29, 2019

I think it's really a hard lesson for me, but I've also learn a lot, thanks a lot for the teacher and coursera. Some Programming test take too long to execute, and there are some errors in it. just be careful

By Suyog P

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Sep 2, 2019

Finally understood basic intuition of PCA, never got perfect resource before. However, there was a sharp change in terms of course delivery than the previous two courses of this specialization. So, heads up.

By Alina I H

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Jan 19, 2021

Sometimes the instructions in the labs were a little unclear. Also, the instructor could have displayed a little more fun - but I guess that's how we Germans are ;) still a very recommendable course!

By Divya M

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Nov 17, 2020

The Programming assignments are quite challenging. The teaching part doesn't equip you with enough resources regarding numpy to get full marks in the Programming Assignments. Good teaching though.

By Camilo J

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Mar 1, 2019

Great capstone for the three-class Mathematics for Machine Learning series. Assignments were way harder and programming debugging skills had to be appropiate in order to finish the class.

By Lotachukwu I

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Jun 27, 2020

Very challenging at times, but very good course none the less. Would recommend to any one who has a solid foundation of Linear Algebra (Course 1) and Multivariate Calculus (Course 2).

By Zhou W

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Oct 4, 2020

Fascinating course! The lecturer gives very detailed illustrations to many complicate concepts. It will be much better if the submitting systems work fine for the last assignment.

By Faisal k

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May 28, 2020

Course content is interesting and well planned, Can be improved by making it Simpler for Students as it was more technical than the other 2 courses of the Specialization.

By Tarik R

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Sep 10, 2020

it's very fantastic course.i enjoyed a lot.i feel reading material should be increases in those courses,others things are perfectly ok.thanks for offering this courses.

By Abhishek P

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Sep 9, 2019

Course content tackles a difficult topic well. Only flaw is that programming assignments are poorly designed in some places and are quite difficult to pick up at times.

By Hadhrami A G

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Jun 7, 2020

The course is generally good but the assignment setting definitely needs to be rectified. Thanks anyway for this course. An important element of machine learning.

By Liang S

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Jul 9, 2018

Teaching pacing is good, and clear in explanation. It will be good if there are some examples about how we should apply all these theories to some real problems.

By Kevin E

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Aug 27, 2020

Overall the course was great. The only thing was that there was a lot I didn't understand from the videos. The recommended textbook resource was a great help.

By Ezequiel P

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Sep 26, 2020

The other two courses were much more didactic. And there were some bugs in these courses assignments... But, overall, it was a great course on the subject

By Mohamed B

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Oct 27, 2019

I learned a lot in this course, though the last week was somehow hurried and the lecturer didn't spend enough time to piece the whole stuff together.

By Jorge L C T

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Sep 5, 2021

The explanation of the model is very precise but there are unnecesary comments for PCA omit the comments related with std in the final assignment

By Rok Z

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Feb 5, 2020

A different course than the previous 2.

Much harder - as you have to actually know some Python tricks.

But I guess it's the same in a real world.

By Jordan V

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Aug 23, 2019

Course addresses important subject, but I worth like to have more in-depth explanation of the mathematics by the instructors and more examples.

By Kevin G

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Jan 14, 2020

Felt like explanations in this course were a bit confusing, but otherwise, it was a very interesting course. Thank you so much for doing this.

By Helena S P

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Feb 28, 2020

The final Notebook contains some errors (Xbar instead of X, passed as an argument). Otherwise a very well organized course. Thanks a lot!

By Giri G

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Jun 7, 2019

This was a very hard course for me. But I think the instructor has done the best possible he can with presenting and explaining the course

By Leon T

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Jul 10, 2020

Jupyter notebook assignments are in desperate need of attention! Very buggy or non-intuitive for the scope of material in span of time.