This 2-day immersive course moves beyond the "black box" approach to machine learning. While covering core algorithms (Supervised, Unsupervised, and Reinforcement Learning), this curriculum emphasizes the complete ML lifecycle. Participants will learn not just how to train a model, but how to prepare "messy" real-world data, select the mathematically appropriate algorithms, evaluate models using advanced metrics (F1, ROC), and understand the ethical and strategic implications of deployment.
Learning Outcomes:
- Perform Feature Engineering and data cleaning on raw datasets (Addressing Methodological Gap).
- Implement and distinguish between Supervised (Regression/Classification) and
- Unsupervised Learning.
- Apply Model Selection Theory to choose algorithms based on data characteristics rather than trial-and-error.
- Evaluate models using Precision, Recall, F1 Score, and ROC Curves.
- Audit models for Algorithmic Bias and understand the MLOps lifecycle (Addressing Contextual Gap).
Module 1: The Reality of ML
- Overview of ML applications and the role of AI Engineering
- The AI Lifecycle: Moving beyond "code" to scoping and strategy
- Gap Fill: Defining the business problem before coding (for Project Managers)
Module 2: Data Engineering & Preparation
- The "Data-Ready" Workshop: Handling missing values, outlier detection, and normalization
- Feature Selection vs. Feature Engineering
- Activity: Cleaning a "broken" dataset using Pandas.
Module 3: Supervised Learning (Regression)
- Linear Regression mechanics.
- Theory Deep Dive: Overfitting, Underfitting, and Bias-Variance Tradeoff.
- Case Study: Predicting house prices (Coding + Residual Analysis).
Module 4: Supervised Learning (Classification)
- Logistic Regression & Support Vector Machines (SVM).
- Decision Trees & Random Forests.
- Case Study: Predicting loan approvals and classifying handwritten digits.
- Critical Context: Why we choose Random Forest over SVM (interpretability vs. accuracy).
Challenge: The "Glass Box" Approach
- Hands-on: Build a classifier for employee attrition
- Hyperparameter Tuning: Using GridSearch to optimize models (moving beyond default settings).
- Interpretability: Visualising Decision Trees to explain why a prediction was made.
Module 5: Unsupervised & Reinforcement Learning
- Unsupervised: Clustering (K-Means) and Dimensionality Reduction (PCA).