Mathematics for Machine Learning: PCA (Coursera)

At the end of this course, you'll be familiar with important mathematical concepts and you can implement PCA all by yourself. If you’re struggling, you'll find a set of jupyter notebooks that will allow you to explore properties of the techniques and walk you through what you need to do to get on track. If you are already an expert, this course may refresh some of your knowledge.

The lectures, examples and exercises require:

1. Some ability of abstract thinking

2. Good background in linear algebra (e.g., matrix and vector algebra, linear independence, basis)

3. Basic background in multivariate calculus (e.g., partial derivatives, basic optimization)

4. Basic knowledge in python programming and numpy

Disclaimer: This course is substantially more abstract and requires more programming than the other two courses of the specialization. However, this type of abstract thinking, algebraic manipulation and programming is necessary if you want to understand and develop machine learning algorithms.
What You Will Learn

- Implement mathematical concepts using real-world data

- Derive PCA from a projection perspective

- Understand how orthogonal projections work

- Master PCA

Course 3 of 3 in the Mathematics for Machine Learning Specialization.

Syllabus

WEEK 1

Statistics of Datasets

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is one of the most important dimensionality reduction algorithms in machine learning. In this course, we lay the mathematical foundations to derive and understand PCA from a geometric point of view. In this module, we learn how to summarize datasets (e.g., images) using basic statistics, such as the mean and the variance. We also look at properties of the mean and the variance when we shift or scale the original data set. We will provide mathematical intuition as well as the skills to derive the results. We will also implement our results in code (jupyter notebooks), which will allow us to practice our mathematical understand to compute averages of image data sets.

WEEK 2

Inner Products

Data can be interpreted as vectors. Vectors allow us to talk about geometric concepts, such as lengths, distances and angles to characterise similarity between vectors. This will become important later in the course when we discuss PCA. In this module, we will introduce and practice the concept of an inner product. Inner products allow us to talk about geometric concepts in vector spaces. More specifically, we will start with the dot product (which we may still know from school) as a special case of an inner product, and then move toward a more general concept of an inner product, which play an integral part in some areas of machine learning, such as kernel machines (this includes support vector machines and Gaussian processes). We have a lot of exercises in this module to practice and understand the concept of inner products.

WEEK 3

Orthogonal Projections

In this module, we will look at orthogonal projections of vectors, which live in a high-dimensional vector space, onto lower-dimensional subspaces. This will play an important role in the next module when we derive PCA. We will start off with a geometric motivation of what an orthogonal projection is and work our way through the corresponding derivation. We will end up with a single equation that allows us to project any vector onto a lower-dimensional subspace. However, we will also understand how this equation came about. As in the other modules, we will have both pen-and-paper practice and a small programming example with a jupyter notebook.

WEEK 4

Principal Component Analysis

We can think of dimensionality reduction as a way of compressing data with some loss, similar to jpg or mp3. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is one of the most fundamental dimensionality reduction techniques that are used in machine learning. In this module, we use the results from the first three modules of this course and derive PCA from a geometric point of view. Within this course, this module is the most challenging one, and we will go through an explicit derivation of PCA plus some coding exercises that will make us a proficient user of PCA.