

Stanford Class: Probabilistic Graphical Models - sabraham
http://www.pgm-class.org/
If this is not a watered down version of the offline Stanford course, this really isn't to be missed-- Koller is a huge force in PGMs.
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sabraham
PGMs don't get the same sexy treatment that ML and AI seem to get in pop
science articles, so it may be worth stating explicitly that they're very much
used in ML and are intellectually fascinating in their own right. A graphical
model can fully describe the distribution and dependences of a model. Why this
is important: a graphical model makes it very easy to give a computer your
model, and there has been great success over the past two decades in doing
just this [1].

Further, Daphne Koller is a serious force in the field, and seems to be a
pretty good supervisor, so I'm guessing/hoping she is an interesting/engaging
lecturer as well. Though, Stanford CS/Stats students are more able to comment
on this last point.

[1] <http://www.mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk/bugs/winbugs/contents.shtml>

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taejo
I'm I right to surmise that "graphical" refers to graphs rather than
"graphics", or was that just one example in the video?

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gwern
Yes. Confusing, isn't it?

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dudurocha
For me, as non native English speaker is more confusing.

In Portuguese we say grafos(graphs) and gráficos, when we refer to pics and
images. And when I read something in English, I wonder if its graphs referring
to maths or to pics.

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dvse
If you are interested in learning this topic, do not go directly to
Koller/Friedman book - it sure contains a lot of material but its presentation
is not well integrated (just look at the topic dependency graph at the
beginning).

A much more cohesive introduction would be Michael Jordan's book draft that
has been floating around for nearly a decade now. You can find some of the
older versions online, e.g. <http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~lebanon/pub/book>

Go directly to chapter 5 to see how the language of PGMs can help to clarify a
lot of standard material in stats and ML.

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plinkplonk
Was this (Jordan's) book published? If yes, what is it called? He seems to
have a couple of other books on Graphical models, but the contents of those
book don't line up with the ones at the link above.

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antics
This book does not exist as a published volume, at least not in the way it is
presented in this draft. This is why it tends to circulate as a draft, rather
than as (say) an Amazon link.

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plinkplonk
Thank You. I spent some time looking for it. And if anyone who has an up to
date draft wants to send me a copy, my email is in my profile, Thanks in
Advance :).

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forkandwait
I have the book, and it is fantastically well written and easy to follow. I
just signed up -- does anyone know if they send an email or something?

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bravura
Based upon reading the course description, if you can grok Daphne + Nir's
book, then you won't learn anything from the class.

"This class does require some abstract thinking and mathematical skills.
However, it is designed to require fairly little background, and a motivated
student can pick up the background material as the concepts are introduced. We
hope that, using our new learning platform, it should be possible for everyone
to understand all of the core material."

and "For additional depth, you can refer to the best-selling textbook,
_Probabilistic Graphical Models: Principles and Techniques_ by Daphne and Nir
Friedman."

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forkandwait
I can grok the book, but I can't read it like it's a vampire novel and
remember anything useful... hence the reason to sign up and have something of
a schedule to follow.

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johnohara
I'm curious. Why do these classes all have their own domain names?

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queensnake
You mean as opposed to pgm-class.online.stanford.edu? Well they're cheap, it
makes the urls shorter, it's less confusing. Just good design. But too, I
guess the ai-class is run by one of the teachers' startups, so it may be to
separate them from Stanford, for that reason and to make it clear that you
don't get Stanford credit.

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adbge

        > Just good design.
    

From a SEO standpoint, it would make more sense to have them all hosted at
stanford.edu/someclass, since the classes would then benefit from the "trust-
factor" of the root domain. You'll notice that most of Google's web properties
are hosted at google.com/something and not something.google.com or a separate
domain, presumably for the same reason.

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spicyj
Consider: maps., docs., mail., plus., groups., translate., books., scholar.
There are probably a bunch more -- I don't think Google is scared of
subdomains.

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melipone
I think I'll wait for the 2nd edition of the book before taking the class.

