Christina Fuller was down to the wire. With less than one week to go before the new school year, the Willowbrook mother who works in students services at Santa Monica College still didn't know where her son would start sixth grade. So one night last week, she brought Robert, a quiet 11-year-old wearing a Minecraft T-shirt, to an orientation she stumbled upon online for the district's newest offering: the Boys Academic Leadership Academy. The school, known as BALA, emphasizes science, technology, arts, engineering and math, or STEAM education. Classes at the Washington Prep campus in South L.A. begin Tuesday.

About this course: Welcome to the Advanced Linear Models for Data Science Class 2: Statistical Linear Models. This class is an introduction to least squares from a linear algebraic and mathematical perspective. Before beginning the class make sure that you have the following: - A basic understanding of linear algebra and multivariate calculus. After taking this course, students will have a firm foundation in a linear algebraic treatment of regression modeling. This will greatly augment applied data scientists' general understanding of regression models.

About this course: Welcome to the Cloud Computing Applications course, the second part of a two-course series designed to give you a comprehensive view on the world of Cloud Computing and Big Data! In this second course we continue Cloud Computing Applications by exploring how the Cloud opens up data analytics of huge volumes of data that are static or streamed at high velocity and represent an enormous variety of information. Cloud applications and data analytics represent a disruptive change in the ways that society is informed by, and uses information. We start the first week by introducing some major systems for data analysis including Spark and the major frameworks and distributions of analytics applications including Hortonworks, Cloudera, and MapR. By the middle of week one we introduce the HDFS distributed and robust file system that is used in many applications like Hadoop and finish week one by exploring the powerful MapReduce programming model and how distributed operating systems like YARN and Mesos support a flexible and scalable environment for Big Data analytics.

Hello, I'm looking for some advice on school choices for someone from a non-traditional background (undergrad and current master in chemical engineering, focused on controls) for getting into the ML field. Currently doing 1st year of 2 in Master in chemical engineering, my research topic is applying reinforcement learning to optimal control problems in smart grid energy management/demand-side management. I've been learning ML and RL for the past 3 years, can currently keep up with papers, implement these papers in Tensorflow, Pytorch and working on some additional personal projects (Deep RL related). Ultimately I'd like to work in a ML/RL research or applied position (non-academic, in private company research labs). My current worry is that my chem eng background is a bit of a non-traditional background, and I'm not sure how much of that will hinder my goal for getting the jobs I'm aiming for.

About this course: This course covers advanced topics in R programming that are necessary for developing powerful, robust, and reusable data science tools. Topics covered include functional programming in R, robust error handling, object oriented programming, profiling and benchmarking, debugging, and proper design of functions. Upon completing this course you will be able to identify and abstract common data analysis tasks and to encapsulate them in user-facing functions. Because every data science environment encounters unique data challenges, there is always a need to develop custom software specific to your organization's mission. You will also be able to define new data types in R and to develop a universe of functionality specific to those data types to enable cleaner execution of data science tasks and stronger reusability within a team.

About this course: Welcome to the Advanced Linear Models for Data Science Class 1: Least Squares. This class is an introduction to least squares from a linear algebraic and mathematical perspective. Before beginning the class make sure that you have the following: - A basic understanding of linear algebra and multivariate calculus. After taking this course, students will have a firm foundation in a linear algebraic treatment of regression modeling. This will greatly augment applied data scientists' general understanding of regression models.

About this course: Probabilistic graphical models (PGMs) are a rich framework for encoding probability distributions over complex domains: joint (multivariate) distributions over large numbers of random variables that interact with each other. These representations sit at the intersection of statistics and computer science, relying on concepts from probability theory, graph algorithms, machine learning, and more. They are the basis for the state-of-the-art methods in a wide variety of applications, such as medical diagnosis, image understanding, speech recognition, natural language processing, and many, many more. They are also a foundational tool in formulating many machine learning problems. This course is the third in a sequence of three.

Deep learning techniques have been hugely successful for traditional supervised and unsupervised machine learning problems. In large part, these techniques solve continuous optimization problems. Recently however, discrete generative deep learning models have been successfully used to efficiently search high-dimensional discrete spaces. These methods work by representing discrete objects as sequences, for which powerful sequence-based deep models can be employed. Unfortunately, these techniques are significantly hindered by the fact that these generative models often produce invalid sequences. As a step towards solving this problem, we propose to learn a deep recurrent validator model. Given a partial sequence, our model learns the probability of that sequence occurring as the beginning of a full valid sequence. Thus this identifies valid versus invalid sequences and crucially it also provides insight about how individual sequence elements influence the validity of discrete objects. To learn this model we propose an approach inspired by seminal work in Bayesian active learning. On a synthetic dataset, we demonstrate the ability of our model to distinguish valid and invalid sequences. We believe this is a key step toward learning generative models that faithfully produce valid discrete objects.

Accurately predicting the time of occurrence of an event of interest is a critical problem in longitudinal data analysis. One of the main challenges in this context is the presence of instances whose event outcomes become unobservable after a certain time point or when some instances do not experience any event during the monitoring period. Such a phenomenon is called censoring which can be effectively handled using survival analysis techniques. Traditionally, statistical approaches have been widely developed in the literature to overcome this censoring issue. In addition, many machine learning algorithms are adapted to effectively handle survival data and tackle other challenging problems that arise in real-world data. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive and structured review of the representative statistical methods along with the machine learning techniques used in survival analysis and provide a detailed taxonomy of the existing methods. We also discuss several topics that are closely related to survival analysis and illustrate several successful applications in various real-world application domains. We hope that this paper will provide a more thorough understanding of the recent advances in survival analysis and offer some guidelines on applying these approaches to solve new problems that arise in applications with censored data.