Coursera has finally issued me the statement of accomplishment for the Probabilistic Graphical Models Course I took last December. Since 2012, I have completed 7 online courses with Coursera. I have the faintest idea about the subject when I sign up for it. Little do I know what a killer course it will be.
So what is Probabilistic Graphical Models about? It is a system to model the world with lot of uncertainties using probability and network. The application include medical diagnosis, traffic prediction, speech recognition and so on. It requires lot of proficiency in math and probability. This is really pushing the limit of my knowledge. I have spent hours pounding on the programming exercise. It actually foster a lively online student community to tackle these really tough problems together. This completion statement is definitely the most hard earned one. Just don't ask me how much I still remember after the course.
Along with Probabilistic Graphical Models, I did the seemingly suicidal feat of taking 2 other courses at the same time. It does take a lot of effort to keep track of three courses. But in terms of workload, PGM is so overwhelming that those other courses does not seem to add much overall. In fact they sometimes make a nice diversion to the PGM course.
2013.01.15 comments