IIT Kharagpur Invites Applications for Free Online Course on Machine Learning

IIT Kharagpur has invited applications for a free online course called “Introduction to Machine Learning” on the NPTEL platform. The course offers a succinct overview of the fundamental principles in machine learning and well-known algorithms used in the field. Students will receive an understanding of the most popular supervised learning algorithms including linear regression, logistic regression, decision trees, k-nearest neighbour, an introduction to Bayesian learning and the naïve Bayes algorithm. Additionally, the course will be accompanied by hands-on problem solving with programming in Python and some tutorial sessions.

The course will be conducted by Sudeshna Sarkar who is a professor and currently the Head in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Kharagpur. She completed her BTech in 1989 from IIT Kharagpur, MS from University of California, Berkeley, and PhD from IIT Kharagpur in 1995. Participants will also receive two credit points and a certificate of completion upon paying Rs 1000 and clearing an exam.

What the IIT Kharagpur Free Online Course on Machine Learning Will Cover?

Students will get an insight into various issues related to the application of machine learning algorithms, hypothesis space, overfitting, bias and variance, tradeoffs between representational power and learnability, evaluation strategies and cross-validation. Some of the topics that will be covered as part of the course are as follows:

• Basic definitions, types of learning, hypothesis space and inductive bias, evaluation, and cross-validation.
• Linear regression, decision trees, and overfitting.
• Instance based learning, feature reduction, and collaborative filtering based recommendation.
• Probability and Bayes learning.
• Logistic regression, support vector machine, Kernel function and Kernel SVM.
• Perceptron, multilayer network, backpropagation, and introduction to deep neural network.
• Computational learning theory, PAC learning model, Sample complexity, VC dimension, and ensemble learning.
• Clustering: k-means, adaptive hierarchical clustering, and Gaussian mixture model.

Important Details of the IIT Kharagpur Online Course on Machine Learning

The course will commence on 24 July 2023, and conclude on 15 September 2023. The last date for enrollment is 31 July 2023. If you wish to register for the exam, the deadline is 18 August 2023. The examination will be held on 24 September 2023, in accordance with Indian Standard Time (IST). Those who wish to know more about the course are advised to go through the official website for more information.