Skills you'll gain

Specialization - 3 course series

Through the assignments of this specialisation you will use the skills you have learned to produce mini-projects with Python on interactive notebooks, an easy to learn tool which will help you apply the knowledge to real world problems. For example, using linear algebra in order to calculate the page rank of a small simulated internet, applying multivariate calculus in order to train your own neural network, performing a non-linear least squares regression to fit a model to a data set, and using principal component analysis to determine the features of the MNIST digits data set.

Since we're aiming at data-driven applications, we'll be implementing some of these ideas in code, not just on pencil and paper. Towards the end of the course, you'll write code blocks and encounter Jupyter notebooks in Python, but don't worry, these will be quite short, focussed on the concepts, and will guide you through if you’ve not coded before. At the end of this course you will have an intuitive understanding of vectors and matrices that will help you bridge the gap into linear algebra problems, and how to apply these concepts to machine learning.

This course offers a brief introduction to the multivariate calculus required to build many common machine learning techniques. We start at the very beginning with a refresher on the “rise over run” formulation of a slope, before converting this to the formal definition of the gradient of a function. We then start to build up a set of tools for making calculus easier and faster. Next, we learn how to calculate vectors that point up hill on multidimensional surfaces and even put this into action using an interactive game. We take a look at how we can use calculus to build approximations to functions, as well as helping us to quantify how accurate we should expect those approximations to be. We also spend some time talking about where calculus comes up in the training of neural networks, before finally showing you how it is applied in linear regression models. This course is intended to offer an intuitive understanding of calculus, as well as the language necessary to look concepts up yourselves when you get stuck. Hopefully, without going into too much detail, you’ll still come away with the confidence to dive into some more focused machine learning courses in future.

Mathematics for Machine Learning: Multivariate Calculus

Mathematics for Machine Learning: PCA