APPLIED MACHINE

1
LEARNING AND AI
Online Certificate Program

OVERVIEW
With the rise and acceleration of AI, machine learning (ML) has become an
increasingly critical tool for the development of computer systems with the ability to
learn and discover patterns in data. Gaining a foundation in the concepts and practices
of ML can set you up to understand new advancements and grow your career in this
field.

In this certificate program, you will gain the skills that will enable you to build ML
solutions in real-world conditions through an ethical and inclusive lens. You will
discover the machine learning lifecycle, explore common machine learning packages,
and work with industry-relevant tools to analyze large data sets. By the end of the
program, you will have hands-on practice and experience building machine learning
workflows and optimizing ML models from scratch to solve problems or achieve goals.

COURSES COURSE LENGTH FORMAT

7 2 weeks 100% online

COURSES
• Machine Learning Foundations • Improving Performance With Ensemble
• Managing Data in Machine Learning Methods
• Training Common Machine Learning • Using Machine Learning for Text
Models Analysis
• Training Linear Models
• Evaluating and Improving Your Model

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2 INSIDE the PROGRAM

100% ONLINE

KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Understand the machine learning • Examine the principle of ensemble
lifecycle and explore common machine models and how to train and tune a
learning packages model using models as features
• Perform exploratory analysis to prepare • Perform NLP sentiment analysis and
data for machine learning applications implement deep learning models
• Train and optimize two popular • Identify performance issues and find
supervised learning algorithms: solutions to fix and improve them
k-nearest neighbors (KNN) and decision
trees (DT)
• Discover the mechanics of linear models
and implement a common linear model
from scratch
• Define the model evaluation metrics
for specific applications by selecting
the appropriate model candidates and
hyperparameters for testing

WHO SHOULD ENROLL

• Data scientists and data analysts • Product managers
• Programmers, developers, and software • Entrepreneurs
engineers • Working professionals seeking to upskill
• Statisticians or career change

WHAT YOU’LL EARN

• Applied Machine Learning and AI Certificate from
Cornell Tech
• 140 Professional Development Hours (14 CEUs)

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COURSE
DESCRIPTIONS
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MACHINE LEARNING FOUNDATIONS

Machine learning (ML) is the use and development of computer systems with the
ability to learn and discover patterns in data. You even encounter some of these
systems on a daily basis; for example, a computer program can determine whether
an email is spam or not spam, and a computer program can find patterns among
shoppers and recommend products tailored toward their needs and interests.
Learning to analyze and visualize data in meaningful ways is a critical step in your
study of ML.

In this course, you will start by exploring the role that machine learning plays in the
industry for decision making and its impact on your role. The characteristics of a
particular problem, the data you have to work with, and the questions you want to
answer will dictate what type of ML approach, method, and algorithm needs to be
used. Once you cover the basic role of machine learning and the process from start to
finish, you will gain experience in industry-relevant tools such as Jupyter Notebooks,
NumPy, and Pandas.

MANAGING DATA IN MACHINE LEARNING

One of the most important steps in the machine learning process is understanding
and preparing data. Before you can learn to train models, you need to ensure the data
selected for your model is appropriate to solve the problem.

In this course, you will focus on taking raw data, analyzing and organizing it, and
preparing it for the next stage of the machine learning process: modeling. You will
practice identifying examples, along with their features and labels, to prepare for
supervised learning. You will also practice organizing your data into a data matrix. You
will learn about feature engineering, which will allow you to transform your data into a
format that is most appropriate for your specific model. By the end of the course, you
will be set up with the necessary foundations for managing data in ML.

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TRAINING COMMON MACHINE LEARNING MODELS

After data has been prepared, the next step in the machine learning lifecycle is
model training and evaluation. In this course, you will focus on the model training
and evaluation process for supervised learning models and explore a few supervised
learning algorithms that are commonly used. You will be introduced to the model
training for two popular supervised learning algorithms: k-nearest neighbors (KNN)
and decision trees (DT), exploring their applicability to classification problems. You
will practice creating your own machine learning models using a popular Python
package for machine learning called scikit-learn. By the end of this course, you will
have new, applicable skills in training common ML models.

TRAINING LINEAR MODELS

Linear models are a class of supervised learning models that are represented by an
equation and use a linear combination of features and weights to compute the label
of an unlabeled example. Linear models are simple to implement, fast to train, and
relatively low in complexity.

In this course, you will explore several linear models, including logistic regression,
one of the most powerful linear models used in classification. Logistic regression is
used to predict the probability of an outcome. While the focus of the unit will be on
logistic regression, you will also be introduced to a common linear model used to
solve regression problems: linear regression. You will delve into important concepts
specific to the training of linear models, including the optimization algorithm, gradient
descent, and the loss function evaluation tool. You will be given the opportunity to
implement a logistic regression model from scratch using NumPy, and you will see
a demonstration of how a linear regression model can be used to solve real-world
regression problems, applying your experience to relevant scenarios.

EVALUATING AND IMPROVING YOUR MODEL

Once you have trained your model, how do you know whether it will generalize well
to new data? In this course, you will focus on techniques that can be used to properly

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evaluate and improve a model’s performance with the view toward producing the best
model for your data and machine learning problem. You will explore different model
selection methods that are used to find the best-performing model, and you will apply
common out-of-sample validation methods that are used to test your model on unseen
data in support of model selection.

You will also discover how both hyperparameter configurations as well as feature
combinations play roles in model performance. Using your own implementation along
with built-in scikit-learn libraries, you will determine the optimal hyperparameter
configuration for your model and perform feature selection techniques to find the
combination of features that results in the best model performance.

IMPROVING PERFORMANCE WITH ENSEMBLE METHODS

Ensemble modeling is a helpful and important technique used in machine learning.

It’s a powerful approach to train multiple models and quantify them into a single
prediction. There are three commonly used ensemble techniques: stacking, bagging,
and boosting. So how do you know which ensemble method to use and when to use it?

In this course, you will explore stacking, bagging, and boosting techniques, including
the motivation behind using each and understanding their optimal scenarios as
well as their tradeoffs. By the end of this course, you will have observed a number of
robust algorithm case studies, such as random forests and gradient boosted decision
trees, that employ these methods. You will also have the opportunity to put this new
knowledge into action by practicing building and optimizing various ensemble models.

USING MACHINE LEARNING FOR TEXT ANALYSIS

Natural language processing (NLP) is a branch of artificial intelligence that helps

machines process and understand human language in speech and text form. In order
for machine learning models to process words and blocks of text, the text must first be
transformed into numerical features. There are various NLP preprocessing techniques
that accomplish this.

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In this course, you will explore these techniques and the typical workflow for
converting text data for NLP. You will also use a special scikit-learn utility that allows
you to automate the workflow as a pipeline. At the end of the course, you will have the
opportunity to explore neural networks, powerful ML models that are heavily used in
the field of NLP. You will also discover different Python packages used to construct
neural networks and see how to implement a feedforward neural network using Keras.
You will then delve into deep neural networks, which are used to solve large-scale
complex problems, and you will implement a deep neural network for sentiment
analysis. By the end of this course, you will have a foundation in using ML for text
analysis relevant to limitless real-life applications.

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