CS/CNS/EE 156a: Learning Systems (Fall 2007)

Frequently Asked Questions

We will attempt to post in a timely fashion any student questions / homework clarifications. Please send your questions to cs156ta@work.caltech.edu. We also have an announcements mailing list cs156@work.caltech.edu. You can subscribe to receive emails or read the messages directly online.


General

Late Submission The late penalty applies only to the late problems. Problems handed in on time will not be penalized. A cross reference between pieces of homeworks is appreciated. Please submit the late homework directly to the TA in charge and timestamp it when you drop it off.
On-line Submission will not be accepted. A hard copy of homework is needed.
Collaboration Policy For HW 4 and 5, you are allowed to start working on the final solutions of a problem while still collaborating on another problem. Please note that you should write the final solutions alone and understand them fully, and you should not consult any notes taken during the collaboration phase or compare/check answers with others. Refer to the Collaboration Policy for full details.
Source code should be turned in along with the homework. It is explicitly stated in the Course Policy. If you did not included it and wish to turn it in, you can give a hard copy directly to the TA in-charge.

Homework #3

Problem 1 Part (a) asks for the best hypothesis. The best hypothesis does not depend on the training examples. It is the hypothesis that can achive the lowest test error with respect to the input distribution on x.
Part (b) asks for the expected value of the hypothesis. The answer should be a complete function on [-π, π] whose value at a point x is the expected value of g(x) where g is the hypothesis that the learning model produces based on the two examples (hence the expectation is with respect to the two examples).
For Numerically evaluation the integrals, a hint is that when you are doing integral over a linear function a*x+b (where x is a variable not being integrated over), you end up having a linear function A*x+B (where A is some integration involving only a and B is some integration involving only b). Evaluating A and B separately may give matlab or mathematica a better form for solving it (for one thing, the non-numerical x won't be there).
Problem 2 For parts (v) and (vi), you need to numerically find &Delta u and &Delta v which minimizes the second order approximation of &Delta E. Another approach is use the Newton's method, which would give you a direction along with a prescribed step size. You can use the direction and restrict the step size to 0.1. Either of the approaches is acceptable for the homework, although we do encourage the students to try both of them.

Homework #4

Code Source code is required for problems 1 and 4.
Boundary The decision boundary is a curve along which two areas with different classes (labels) meet. The boundary of RBF consists of points x such that g(x) is 0. contour(x,y,z,[0,0]) may be convenient for plotting the boundaries.
Leave-one-out Take one point at a time from the training set and assume that it is the "test data." Classify the point using the remaining training points. Repeat this for all points in the training set and compute the average error.
Problem 4 When comparing results with those from HW#1, use the mean square error.
Problem 1 You need to run the steepest descent/conjugate gradient for 250 time steps.

Homework #5

quadprog When using quadprog in matlab, set the upper bounds to some large number (say 99999) instead of infinity.
Code Source code is required for problems 1 and 4.
Error For problem 1 (and 4), please threshold your outputs to +/- 1 as your g(x) (to do classification), and then compute the mean squared error mean((g(x) - y)^2).
Specialized packages The "kmeans" function in MATLAB, or the "svmtrain" function, or routines of similar nature, are regarded as specialized packages and you should not use them for solving the problems. You are allowed to use general-purpose optimization routines like "quadprog", "minimize", etc..

Updated: 11/30/2007