What you'll learn
Statistics of Datasets
Inner Products
Orthogonal Projections
Principal Component Analysis
Description
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.
Requirements
Access to a computer or mobile device with an internet connection.
Motivation to learn!
There are no special materials or prerequisite knowledge required for this course.
Who this course is for
Students who are new to this field
Students willing to put in a couple hours to learn about Mathematics for Machine Learning: PCA
Advanced students wanting to add another skill to their portfolio
Content Creator
Marc P. Deisenroth – Lecturer in Statistical Machine Learning – Department of Computing
This course includes
Participation Confirmation/Certificate
Option for learning at your own pace
Videos and reading material about the course
Practice tests
Assessed tasks with feedback from other course participants
Evaluated tests with feedback
Evaluated programming tasks