AI skills: Introduction to Unsupervised, Deep and Reinforcement Learning

In this course you will learn the basics of several machine learning topics to help you solve real life challenges. Unsupervised learning techniques such as clustering and dimensionality reduction are useful to make sense of large and/or high dimensional datasets that are not annotated. Deep learning is a supervised learning technique that is useful to train neural networks to solve more complicated classification and regression tasks. Finally, reinforcement learning techniques can be used to train AI agents that interact with an environment.

Using hands-on and interactive exercises you will get insight into the fundamental algorithms and basic concepts of:

Clustering is used to identify similar data/objects and patterns from your engineering datasets. It is a technique that is especially useful if you don’t have labeled or annotated data. We explain various approaches to clustering and cover how similarity and dissimilarity measures are used.

Dimensionality reduction techniques are used to reduce the number of features representing a given dataset, while retaining the structure of the dataset. We discuss feature selection and feature extraction techniques such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA), and how and when to apply it.

Deep Learning is a family of machine learning methods based on artificial neural networks. You will learn how to build and train deep neural networks consisting of fully connected neural networks of multiple hidden layers.

Reinforcement learning teaches an AI to interact with an environment. We cover basic reinforcement learning concepts and techniques, such as how to model the system using a Markov Decision Process, and how to train an optimal policy using tabular Q-learning using the Bellman equation.

This course is designed by a team of TU Delft machine learning experts from various backgrounds, highlighting the various topics from their individual perspectives.