I'm a month into my initial Reinforcement Learning Roadmap and a couple things have changed. First of all I've been accepted to University of Michigan Dearborn to begin a Doctor of Engineering degree in January 2026. Second my learnings from the first four weeks have convinced me that I need …

My journey into understanding machine learning began with a 12 week learning syllabus that chatGPT prepared for me. That lead me to the Coursera Deep Learning Specialization which I just completed. The quality of Coursera specialization was excellent and I have a good understanding of the foundations of deep learning …

Week 8 Learning Material

Convolutional Neural Networks - Week 1

This week covered the following topics:

• Explain the convolution operation
• Apply two different types of pooling operations
• Identify the components used in a convolutional neural network (padding, stride, filter, ...) and their purpose
• Build a convolutional neural network
• Implement convolutional and pooling …

Week 7 Learning Material

Structuring Machine Learning Projects - Week 2

This week covered the following topics:

• Carrying Out Error Analysis
• Cleaning Up Incorrectly Labeled Data
• Build your First System Quickly, then Iterate
• Training and Testing on Different Distributions
• Bias and Variance with Mismatched Data Distributions
• Addressing Data Mismatch
• Transfer Learning …

Week 6 Learning Material

Structuring Machine Learning Projects - Week 1

This week covered the following topics:

• Why ML Strategy
• Orthogonalization
• Single Number Evaluation Metric
• Satisficing and Optimizing Metric
• Train/Dev/Test Distributions
• Size of the Dev and Test Sets
• When to Change Dev/Test Sets and Metrics?
• Why Human-level Performance …

Week 5 update for my 12 Week Deep Learning Syllabus

I took a couple of weeks off for a mini vacation to Washington DC to attend my convocation with my family and then ended up getting sick which laid me up for a few days. Haven't been very productive the …

Week 4 Material

Improving Deep Neural Networks: Hyperparameter Tuning, Regularization and Optimization - Week 2

This week covered the following topics:

• Apply optimization methods such as (Stochastic) Gradient Descent, Momentum, RMSProp and Adam
• Use random minibatches to accelerate convergence and improve optimization
• Describe the benefits of learning rate decay and apply …

The Andrew Ng's Coursera courses are so good I'm just going to finish out all 5 courses in the Deep learning Specialization. This will give me the foundational knowledge I'm looking for while I do some small side projects to test some implementations and learning the tools. For my first …

My goal is to do these postings on Sundays but I missed that this week due to taking Saturday off and the fact that week 4 of the the Coursera course took me longer than expected. Time well spent and worth posting on a Wednesday.

Week 2 Material

• Interactive Gradient …

This week I started my (ChatGPT generated) 12 week deep learning path. I didn't get as much time to work on this as I had hoped due to a project at work and frustrating problems on that project. Still happy with progress this week though. The Coursera course is excellent …