Course Staff

Logistics

• Office hours: See calendar.
• Assignments: Assignments should be submitted through Gradescope. Feedback will also be provided on Gradescope. All enrolled students should be in Gradescope automatically–let me know if you are not!
• Discussions: We will be using Ed (sign-up link) for general course-related questions. If you have an individual matter to discuss, email me directly (please put “CSCI 467” in the subject line) or come to my office hours. For grading questions, go to the office hours of the person who graded the problem in question.

Prerequisites

• Algorithms: CSCI 270
• Linear Algebra: MATH 225
• Probability: EE 364 or MATH 407 or BUAD 310

This class will also use some basic multivariate calculus (taking partial derivatives and gradients). However, knowledge of single-variable calculus is sufficient as we will introduce the required material during class and section.

Schedule

All assignments are due by 11:59pm on the indicated date.

Grading

Grades will be based on homework assignments (40%), a class project (20%), and two exams (40%).

Homework Assignments (40% total):

• Homework 0: 4%
• Homeworks 1-4: 9% each

Final Project (20% total). The final project will proceed in three stages:

• Project proposal: 2%
• Midterm report: 3%
• Final project report: 15%

Exams (40% total):

• In-class midterm: 15%
• Final exam (cumulative): 25%

Late days

You have 6 late days you may use on any assignment excluding the Project Final Report. Each late day allows you to submit the assignment 24 hours later than the original deadline. You may use a maximum of 3 late days per assignment. If you are working in a group for the project, submitting the project proposal or midterm report one day late means that each member of the group spends a late day. We do not allow use of late days for the final project report because we must grade the projects in time to submit final course grades.

If you have used up all your late days and submit an assignment late, you will lose 10% of your grade on that assignment for each day late. We will not accept any assignments more than 3 days late.

Final project

The final project can be done individually or in groups of up to 3. This is your chance to freely explore machine learning methods and how they can be applied to a task of our choice. You will also learn about best practices for developing machine learning methods—inspecting your data, establishing baselines, and analyzing your errors.

More information about the final project will be released at a later date. A list of example projects is now available at here.

Resources

While there is no required textbook for this class, you may find the following useful:

• Probabilistic Machine Learning: An Introduction (PML) and Probabilistic Machine Learning: Advanced Topics (PML2) by Kevin Murphy. You may also find PML Chapters 2-3 and 7 useful for reviewing prerequisites.
• The Elements of Statistical Learning by Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani, and Jerome Friedman.
• Patterns, Predictions, and Actions: A Story about Machine Learning by Moritz Hardt and Benjamin Recht
• Fairness and Machine Learning: Limitations and Opportunities (FAML) by Solon Barocas, Moritz Hardt, and Arvind Narayanan.

To review mathematical background material, you may also find the following useful:

• Probability: Introduction to Probability by Joseph Blitzstein and Jessica Hwang. Most relevant reading: Chapters 1-5, 7, 9-10.
• Linear Algebra: Introduction to Applied Linear Algebra by Stephen Boyd and Lieven Vandenberghe. Most relevant reading: Chapters 1-3, 5-8, 10-11. (Chapters 4 and 12-14 overlap with content for this class.)
• Multivariate Calculus: Oliver Knill’s lecture notes.

Other Notes

Collaboration policy and academic integrity: Our goal is to maintain an optimal learning environment. You may discuss the homework problems at a high level with other students, but you should not look at another student’s solutions. Trying to find solutions online or from any other sources for any homework or project is prohibited, will result in zero grade and will be reported. Using AI tools to automatically generate solutions to written or programming problems is also prohibited. To prevent any future plagiarism, uploading any material from the course (your solutions, quizzes etc.) on the internet is prohibited, and any violations will also be reported. Please be considerate, and help us help everyone get the best out of this course.

Please remember the expectations set forth in the USC Student Handbook. General principles of academic honesty include the concept of respect for the intellectual property of others, the expectation that individual work will be submitted unless otherwise allowed by an instructor, and the obligations both to protect one’s own academic work from misuse by others as well as to avoid using another’s work as one’s own. All students are expected to understand and abide by these principles. Suspicion of academic dishonesty may lead to a referral to the Office of Academic Integrity for further review.

Students with disabilities: Any student requesting academic accommodations based on a disability is required to register with Disability Services and Programs (DSP) each semester. A letter of verification for approved accommodations can be obtained from DSP. Please be sure the letter is delivered to the instructor as early in the semester as possible.