Professor
Yizhou Sun
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Most Helpful Review
Winter 2019 - Beware of the demographics of students enrolled. There are a lot of graduate students in this class, who’ve often had 3.8+ GPAs in undergrad. Even the undergrad students tend to geniuses - smarter than your typical UCLA CS students. Many of these students also had prior exposure to data mining and ML - I like to think that the word “introduction” in the course name is misleading, because this class isn’t an introduction for most students who enroll. First of all, let’s talk about the grade distribution. Looks nice, right? Well, I’ll tell you that it’s misleading, and I took the bait. Why so many A’s? Because of the above kinds of students who enroll in this class, who skew the grade distributions of the exams and project. If you’re not one of those students, then this class is actually challenging (due to the people you have to compete against). The content in the class involves a lot of math. If you are thinking of getting into data mining or ML, be prepared for that. I honestly found that I didn’t like this area of CS, which made this class less enjoyable for me. If you’re passionate about it, then go for it, it can certainly make this class feel easier. The lectures are boring - it’s basically the professor reading through slides full of convoluted math equations, that she’ll breeze through as if everyone understands them. I guess the prof caters to the geniuses in this class. The assignments and exams themselves were reasonable, if not slightly on the challenging side. What ruined it for me was the people in this class I had to compete with. In this class, you get six (6) HW assignments. In each assignment, you fill in boilerplate code (typically 10-ish lines), run the program, and write a 2-3 page report answering questions about the topic and about your program results. The top five assignment scores are counted toward your grade. One assignment also has extra credit (in my quarter, it was HW3, the neural network and k-nearest neighbors assignment). The HW can have some inconsistencies - for example, one assignment may require python 2.7 while the next one will require 3.7. On the midterm, you can bring a one-page cheat sheet, and on the final, you can bring two. You are also allowed to bring simple calculators for both exams. Most of the questions were reasonable and involved knowing the details (for example, the strengths and weaknesses) of different algorithms and how to apply them. But again, the geniuses in this class will skew the exam grade distributions to be really high. There is a group term project (along with a report) in which, given a data mining problem, you write an algorithm to solve it, and compete with others on Kaggle. Like I said, many students in this class have done data mining and ML before so you better group up with those people or else you’ll get screwed over. That being said, this class is challenging due to the people you are competing against for your grade. If you hear someone tell you, “this class is easy”, don’t listen to them. This class is not easy; they just think it’s easy because they’re a CS genius, they’ve done data mining before, or are at least passionate about the subject. But if you enjoy data mining and ML, then by all means take this class.
Winter 2019 - Beware of the demographics of students enrolled. There are a lot of graduate students in this class, who’ve often had 3.8+ GPAs in undergrad. Even the undergrad students tend to geniuses - smarter than your typical UCLA CS students. Many of these students also had prior exposure to data mining and ML - I like to think that the word “introduction” in the course name is misleading, because this class isn’t an introduction for most students who enroll. First of all, let’s talk about the grade distribution. Looks nice, right? Well, I’ll tell you that it’s misleading, and I took the bait. Why so many A’s? Because of the above kinds of students who enroll in this class, who skew the grade distributions of the exams and project. If you’re not one of those students, then this class is actually challenging (due to the people you have to compete against). The content in the class involves a lot of math. If you are thinking of getting into data mining or ML, be prepared for that. I honestly found that I didn’t like this area of CS, which made this class less enjoyable for me. If you’re passionate about it, then go for it, it can certainly make this class feel easier. The lectures are boring - it’s basically the professor reading through slides full of convoluted math equations, that she’ll breeze through as if everyone understands them. I guess the prof caters to the geniuses in this class. The assignments and exams themselves were reasonable, if not slightly on the challenging side. What ruined it for me was the people in this class I had to compete with. In this class, you get six (6) HW assignments. In each assignment, you fill in boilerplate code (typically 10-ish lines), run the program, and write a 2-3 page report answering questions about the topic and about your program results. The top five assignment scores are counted toward your grade. One assignment also has extra credit (in my quarter, it was HW3, the neural network and k-nearest neighbors assignment). The HW can have some inconsistencies - for example, one assignment may require python 2.7 while the next one will require 3.7. On the midterm, you can bring a one-page cheat sheet, and on the final, you can bring two. You are also allowed to bring simple calculators for both exams. Most of the questions were reasonable and involved knowing the details (for example, the strengths and weaknesses) of different algorithms and how to apply them. But again, the geniuses in this class will skew the exam grade distributions to be really high. There is a group term project (along with a report) in which, given a data mining problem, you write an algorithm to solve it, and compete with others on Kaggle. Like I said, many students in this class have done data mining and ML before so you better group up with those people or else you’ll get screwed over. That being said, this class is challenging due to the people you are competing against for your grade. If you hear someone tell you, “this class is easy”, don’t listen to them. This class is not easy; they just think it’s easy because they’re a CS genius, they’ve done data mining before, or are at least passionate about the subject. But if you enjoy data mining and ML, then by all means take this class.
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