Syllabus - Probabilistic Models in Informatics

The Graduate University for Advanced Studies (SOKENDAI), Department of Informatics

Second Semester 2007

Probabilistic Models in Informatics

16:30-18:00, Tuesday

The focus of this course is probabilistic models, which play an important role for the modeling of real-world data in various fields of informatics. This course deals with foundations and applications of probability theory, and discusses basic ideas of probabilistic models, such as latent variable models and Bayesian Networks.

Course Plan

1	10/16	Introduction to Probability
2	10/23	Probability Theory and Bayes Theorem
3	10/30	Probability Distributions and Expectation
4	11/06	Likelihood and Bayesian Estimation
5	11/13	Maximum Likelihood
	11/20	Canceled
6	11/27	Latent Variable Models
	12/04	Canceled
7	12/11	Hidden Markov Models
8	12/18	Review of Related Models
9	01/08	Graphical Models (1)
10	01/15	Graphical Models (2)
11	01/22	Sampling and Markov Chain Monte Carlo
12	01/29	Model Selection
	02/05	Canceled for entrance exam
13	02/12	Presentations and Summary

Paper Reading Assignment

1	12/18	Goto Jun	Applying Conditional Random Fields to Japanese Morphological Analysis
2	01/08	Hutchatai Chanlekha	Nymble: a High-Performance Learning Name-finder
3	01/22	Ikeda Naruki	Bayesian Analysis of Empirical Software Engineering Cost Models

Pick up one paper, which may be a standard reading in your research field.
Report the title of the paper to me *one week before your presentation*, and also send me the copy of the paper if possible.
Describe how the paper takes advantage of probabilistic models.
15-min presentation, and 15-min discussion.

Presentation of Experiments

The presentation will be made on Feb. 12, one day for all. 20 minutes for one person including questions.
Describe the purpose of the experiment, methods used, result obtained, and what you learnd from the experiment.
The topic should not be part of your Ph.D. work, but a small problem you are interested in.
Submit a report (a few pages length) on the experiment. The deadline is Feb. 19. Comments on the lecture is also welcome.

Syllabus - Probabilistic Models in Informatics - Second Semester 2007

Course Plan

Paper Reading Assignment

Presentation of Experiments