ST-Stat Machine Learning
This course is intended as an introductory course in statistical machine learning with emphasis on statistical methodology as it applies to large-scale data applications. At the end of this course, students will be able to build and test a latent variable statistical model with companion inference algorithm to solve real problems in a domain of their interest. Course topics include: introduction to exponential families, sufficiency and conjugacy, graphical model framework and approximate inference methods such as expectation-maximization, variational inference, and sampling-based methods.