ST456 Half Unit
Deep Learning
This information is for the 2024/25 session.
Teacher responsible
Prof Milan Vojnovic
Availability
This course is available on the MPA in Data Science for Public Policy, MSc in Applicable Mathematics, MSc in Applied Social Data Science, MSc in Data Science, MSc in Geographic Data Science, MSc in Health Data Science, MSc in Management of Information Systems and Digital Innovation, MSc in Operations Research & Analytics, MSc in Quantitative Methods for Risk Management, MSc in Statistics, MSc in Statistics (Financial Statistics), MSc in Statistics (Financial Statistics) (Research), MSc in Statistics (Research), MSc in Statistics (Social Statistics) and MSc in Statistics (Social Statistics) (Research). This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.
MSc Data Science students will be given priority for enrollment in this course.
Pre-requisites
The course requires some mathematics, particularly basic concepts of linear algebra, and expects a basic knowledge of computer programming, primarily in Python.
Course content
This course is about deep learning, covering fundamental concepts of deep learning, neural networks, training and evaluation methods, and neural network architectures designed for tasks such as prediction and generative models for images, sequences, natural language processing, and large language models. The course will cover the following topics:
- Introduction: course overview
- Introduction to neural networks: single-layer networks, linear discriminant functions, XOR problem, perceptron, multi-layer perceptron, perceptron learning criteria, perceptron learning algorithm, feedforward neural network architecture
- Optimisation algorithms: empirical loss function minimisation, gradient descent algorithm, stochastic gradient descent algorithm
- Advanced optimisation algorithms: adaptive learning rates, momentum, backpropagation, dropout
- Convolutional neural networks (CNNs): principles and basic operations of convolutional neural networks, LeNet example
- Modern convolutional neural networks: understanding principles of modern CNN architectures, including AlexNet, VGGNet, NiN, GoogLeNet, ResNet, and DenseNet
- Recurrent neural networks (RNNs): RNN models, training RNNs, gated RNNs, GRU, LSTM, Deep RNNs, bidirectional RNNs, vector to sequence models using RNNs
- Sequence to sequence models: machine translation tasks, encoder-decoder architecture, attention mechanisms, transformer, large language models
- Autoencoders: introduction to autoe