Coursera: Structuring Machine Learning Projects Review

Structuring Machine Learning Projects is the third course in the new deep learning specialization offered by Coursera taught by Coursera founder Andrew Ng. The two-week course touches on a variety of practical considerations for tackling machine learning projects and making machine learning systems work better, with an emphasis on neural nets. You don't need to have completed the first two courses in the specialization to take this course: anyone with basic knowledge of machine learning could take it. You don't necessarily even have to know about neural networks or deep learning to get value out of this course since many of the topics apply to machine learning in general. There are no programming assignments in this course but it has a couple of quizzes that paying students can submit for a grade.


Structuring Machine Learning Projects consists of roughly 3 hours of lecture content spread over two weeks and two guest lectures that are about 15 minutes apiece. Andrew Ng focuses on teaching tips and tricks he has learned over his many years of experience in machine learning. Major topics include orthogonalization, evaluation metrics, considerations related to human level performance, error checking, issues related to bias and variance, transfer learning and end-to-end deep learning. The video production quality is mediocre but it doesn't detract from the great insight and knowledge Ng conveys in each lecture. Andrew Ng has a practical, hands-on approach to machine learning where the human plays a vital role in helping machine learning systems improve. He isn't afraid to do things like weeding through erroneous predictions and labeling data by hand to improve performance--activities that academics and AI purists might disparage as unscientific. In reality, practical outcomes are necessary to push machine learning forward and achieving them is often more of an art than a science.


Structuring Machine Learning Projects is gold mine of practical wisdom shared by one of the world's leading practitioners of machine learning. Given the minimal time commitment this course requires, you'd be hard pressed to find another machine learning course that provides better value for your time anywhere on the internet.


I give Structuring Machine Learning Projects 5 stars out of 5: Excellent.