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Comment by godzillabrennus | Hacker News Reader

Andrew Ng has a machine learning course online if you are interested: https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning

I've been taking this course recently. Due to time constraints, I haven't kept up with the rest of the course, but the content is phenomenal.

If you want to learn machine learning, check out the course.

Probably one of the best online courses available. He's very engaging and makes some pretty tough concepts seem straightforward.

I took the in-person course at stanford. I recall the first problem set in cs229 was about as hard as the entirety of the Coursera course combined...

Well, everyone can judge by themselves, the actual CS229 lectures are also available online: https://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=A89DCFA6ADACE599

EDIT: And so are the problem sets: https://see.stanford.edu/Course/CS229

There is nothing to indicate the Coursera class and CS 229 are the same. CS 229 is a grad-level machine learning class that assumes heavy math prerequisites; the syllabus is completely different.

The Coursera class is closest to CS 229a at Stanford.

Fair enough, I just wanted to note that people can also watch the CS229 lectures online.

(Disclaimer: I have only seen part of the material, for both courses) This seems true in terms of difficulty, mostly because CS229 assumes a much stronger math background and provides more of the theory for a lot of the ML techniques being used. However, if you want to know the "technique space" of usual ML algorithms and when/how to apply them, the Coursera course seems to be 70-90% of the way there in terms of breadth of the material (with a bias towards the most commonly used methods, so perhaps 70% of the techniques, applicable to more than 90% of the use cases).

So, if you want to do ML in industry, applied to common problems, the Coursera course will get you there. If you want to become an ML researcher, the Coursera course will fall way short of that, while CS229 might be at least a first step (followed by CS229T/STATS231 [1]).

[1] Lecture notes online, too: https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs229t/

It's notable that there are actually no enforced prerequisites for 229, besides basically being OK at math. Which meant that I knew an education major who sat down, tried to take it and sort of crashed and burned in the third week.

Are there any enforced requirements at Stanford? I don't think I ever had any formal review of the classes I signed up for making sure I actually met the requirements -- there must've been at least a handful of classes I had signed up for that I didn't have the official prereqs for.

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