Lectures

Lecturer Varun Kanade
Hours Mon, Tue, Thu: 4-5:30pm
Location Lecture Theatre A
Notes (Lecture Notes)
(Errata - 06/12/2024)
(Updated Lecture Notes)

Note 1. I only expect there to be about 20 hours of lectures in total. I have scheduled more hours and intend to have longer lectures at the start of term to ensure that there is enough time left if rescheduling is necessary.

Note 2. A set of lecture notes (LN) covering the entire course is posted on the website. These are not meant to be used as a substitute for reading the recommended textbooks and other posted reading. These may be edited to improve readability or correct errors. If you find any errors, or have suggestions for improvements, please email the lecturer.

Note 3. There will be parts of suggested reading material that you struggle with or may seem not directly related to what we covered in the lecture. I suggest you skip these sections and only return to them once you've understood the material covered in the lecture and want to increase your understanding further.


Lecture Schedule

Date Topic Reading

14/10/2024 Setting up the PAC Learning Framework Chap 1.1-2 (LN)
Chap 1.1-2 (KV)

15/10/2024 PAC Learning Conjunctions, k-CNF Chap 1.2-3 (LN)
Chap 1.3 (KV)

17/10/2024 Hardness of learing 3-term DNF; PAC Learning Chap 1.4-6 (LN)
Chap 1.4-5 (KV)
Valiant's paper

21/10/2024 Occam's Razor Chap 2 (LN)
Chap 2(KV)

22/10/2024 VC Dimension; Sauer-Shelah Lemma Chap 3.1-2 (LN)
Chap 3.1-4(KV)

28/10/2024 VC Upper and Lower Bounds Chap 3.1-2 (LN)
Chap 3.5-7(KV)

29/10/2024 Weak Learning; AdaBoost Chap 4 (LN)
Adaboost survey
Adaboost article

31/10/2024 AdaBoost; Cryptographic Hardness of Learning Chap 5 (LN)
Chap 6 (KV)

04/11/2024 Cryptographic Hardness of Learning Chap 5 (LN)
Chap 6 (KV)

05/11/2024 Cryptographic Hardness; Exact Learning with MQ + EQ Chap 6.1-2 (LN)
Chap 8.1-2 (KV)

07/11/2024 L* Algorithm Chap 6.3 (LN)
Chap 8.3 (KV)

11/11/2024 Learning with RCN; SQ Learning Chap 7.1-2 (LN)
Chap 5 (KV)

12/11/2024 SQ Learning; Hardness of Learning Parities Chap 7.2-3 (LN)
Chap 5 (KV)

14/11/2024 Learning Real-Valued Functions; Gradient Descent Chap 8.1-2 (LN)
Convex Opt. book (Chap. 3.1)

18/11/2024 Learning LMs, GLMs Chap 8.4-5 (LN)
Chap 3 (MRT)

19/11/2024 Rademacher Complexity Chap 8.3 (LN)
Chap 3 (MRT)

21/11/2024 (Online) Mistake-Bounded Learning Chap 9.1-3 (LN)
Littlestone's paper

25/11/2024 Perceptron and Winnow Chap 9.4-5 (LN)
Littlestone's paper

26/11/2024 Exponentially-weighted Forecaster; Regret Chap 10 (LN)
MWUA Survey