Data Analytics is the science of analyzing data to convert information to useful knowledge. This knowledge could help us understand our world better, and in many contexts enable us to make better decisions. While this is the broad and grand objective, the last 20 years has seen steeply decreasing costs to gather, store, and process data, creating an even stronger motivation for the use of empirical approaches to problem solving. This course seeks to present you with a wide range of data analytic techniques and is structured around the broad contours of the different types of data analytics, namely, descriptive, inferential, predictive, and prescriptive analytics.
With the increased availability of data from varied sources there has been increasing attention paid to the various data driven disciplines such as analytics and machine learning. In this course we intend to introduce some of the basic concepts of machine learning from a mathematically well motivated perspective. We will cover the different learning paradigms and some of the more popular algorithms and architectures used in each of these paradigms.
Reinforcement learning is a paradigm that aims to model the trial-and-error learning process that is needed in many problem situations where explicit instructive signals are not available. It has roots in operations research, behavioral psychology and AI. The goal of the course is to introduce the basic mathematical foundations of reinforcement learning, as well as highlight some of the recent directions of research.