4 ms·

Probably one of the best online courses available. He's very engaging and makes some pretty tough concepts seem straightforward.

• curuinor 11y ago
  I took the in-person course at stanford. I recall the first problem set in cs229 was about as hard as the entirety of the Coursera course combined...
  • icebraining 11y ago
    Well, everyone can judge by themselves, the actual CS229 lectures are also available online: https://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=A89DCFA6ADACE599 https://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=A89DCFA6ADACE599 EDIT: And so are the problem sets: https://see.stanford.edu/Course/CS229 https://see.stanford.edu/Course/CS229
    • argonaut 11y ago
      There is nothing to indicate the Coursera class and CS 229 are the same. CS 229 is a grad-level machine learning class that assumes heavy math prerequisites; the syllabus is completely different. The Coursera class is closest to CS 229a at Stanford.
      • icebraining 11y ago
        Fair enough, I just wanted to note that people can also watch the CS229 lectures online.
  • lazaroclapp 11y ago
    (Disclaimer: I have only seen part of the material, for both courses) This seems true in terms of difficulty, mostly because CS229 assumes a much stronger math background and provides more of the theory for a lot of the ML techniques being used. However, if you want to know the "technique space" of usual ML algorithms and when/how to apply them, the Coursera course seems to be 70-90% of the way there in terms of breadth of the material (with a bias towards the most commonly used methods, so perhaps 70% of the techniques, applicable to more than 90% of the use cases). So, if you want to do ML in industry, applied to common problems, the Coursera course will get you there. If you want to become an ML researcher, the Coursera course will fall way short of that, while CS229 might be at least a first step (followed by CS229T/STATS231 [1]). [1] Lecture notes online, too: https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs229t/ https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs229t/
    • curuinor 11y ago
      It's notable that there are actually no enforced prerequisites for 229, besides basically being OK at math. Which meant that I knew an education major who sat down, tried to take it and sort of crashed and burned in the third week.
      • consz 11y ago
        Are there any enforced requirements at Stanford? I don't think I ever had any formal review of the classes I signed up for making sure I actually met the requirements -- there must've been at least a handful of classes I had signed up for that I didn't have the official prereqs for.