(Also see my full review of Course 1 and Course 2 here.)
Fellows, as you all know by now, Prof. Andrew Ng has started a new Coursera Specialization on Deep Learning. So many of you came to me today and ask my take on the class. As a rule, I usually don’t comment on a class unless I know something about it. (Search for my “Learning Deep Learning – Top 5 Lists” for more details.) But I’d like to make an exception for the Good Professor’s class.
So here is my quick take after browsing through the specialization curriculum:
* Only Course 1 to 3 are published now, they are short classes, more like 2-4 weeks. It feels like the Data Science Specialization so it feels good for beginners. Assume that Course 4 and 5 are long: 4 weeks. So we are talking about 17 weeks of study.
* Unlike the standard Ng’s ML class, python is the default language. That’s good in my view because close to 80-90% of practitioners are using python-based framework.
* Course 1-3 has around 3 weeks of curriculum overlapped with “Intro to Machine Learning” Lecture 2-3. Course 1’s goal seems to implement NN from scratch. Course 2 is on regularization. Course 3 on different methodologies of deep learning and it’s short, only 2 weeks long.
* Course 4 and 5 are about CNN and RNN.
* So my general impression here is that it is more a comprehensive class, comparable with Hugo Larochelle’s Lectures, as well as Hinton’s lecture. Yet the latter two classes are known to be more difficult. Hinton’s class in particular, are know to confuse even PhDs. So that shows one of the values of this new DL class, it is a great transition from “Intro to ML” to more difficult classes such as Hinton’s.
* But how does it compared with other similar course such as Udacity’s DL nanodegree then? I am not sure yet, but the price seems to be more reasonable if you go through the Coursera route. Assume we are talking about 5 months of study, you are paying $245.
* I also found that many existing beginner classes advocate too much on running scripts, but avoid linking more fundamental concepts such as bias/variance with DL. Or go deep to describe models such as Convnet and RNN. cs231n did a good job on Convnet, and cs224n teach you RNN. But they seem to be more difficult than Ng or Udacity’s class. So again, Ng’s class sounds like a great transition class.
* My current take: 1) I am going to take the class myself. 2) It’s very likely this new deeplearning.ai class will change my recommendations of class on Top-5 list.
Hope this is helpful for all of you.
Arthur Chan