Machine Learning Course Syllabus: Best ML & AI Course For Upskill

The PG Diploma course by upGrad is one of the most comprehensive ones. It covers all the knowledge of skills, concepts and tools required in the industry currently.

The syllabus is designed to make you industry ready and ace the interviews with ease.

Let’s go over the complete syllabus for in-depth detail of the coverage of our “Executive PG Programme in Machine Learning and AI”.

The course is divided into 8 main parts:

The Machine Learning Subjects Covered in This Programm;

Before discussing the machine learning course syllabus in detail, let us go through the machine learning subjects you will learn in this programme. 

1. Machine Learning:

Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence that helps make machines capable of taking decisions without being programmed. In the infant stage, machine learning is still a very dynamic subject and does not follow hardcore rules. 

Under this subject, you will learn about the fundamentals of artificial intelligence, machine learning, various algorithms like supervised, semi-supervised, unsupervised or reinforcement learning, Neural Networks and most importantly, machine learning implementations. 

2.Deep Learning:

Depp learning can be classified as a subset of Machine learning that focuses on various machine learning algorithms and neural networks. The subject takes inspiration from the human brain’s neural networks and builds artificial neural networks (ANN) for computers.

After knowing the fundamentals of neural networks under the subject of machine learning, in this subject you will get to know about the differences between neural nets and deep learning, how neural nets learn or feed fwd propagation, what is back end propagation and gradient descent and various activation functions like Sigmoid, ReLu etc. 

You will also learn about some major statistical topics like Binomial distribution and Bernoulli distribution. 

3.Computer Vision: 

Computer Vision is a subset of artificial intelligence (AI) that helps computers to take out an important piece of information from digital images and give suggestive information that can be further utilised to make certain problem-solving recommendations. Two major technologies that are used in building computer vision are deep learning and convolutional neural network (CNN).

Under this subject, you will learn about topics like fundamentals of computer vision, mechanism of computer vision, common applications of computer vision, the challenges of using this technology etc. 

You will also get to know about some of the important topics of computer vision, like scene recognition, action recognition, visual saliency estimation, objectness estimation etc. 

4.Natural Language Processing:

NLP aka Natural Language Processing is a branch of AI that works on empowering computers with the ability to understand the language humans speak or the text that we write. NLP works on the foundation of computational linguistics, ML, deep learning, etc. 

NLP is the technology that Google uses in their very famous Google Translate, which helps translate texts from one language to another. 

Under this subject, you will get to know about topics such as text classification, language modelling, sequence tagging, sequence-to-sequence tasks, vector space models of semantics etc. 

5.Transformers:

Transformers is a model based on a neural network that helps computers learn contexts by tracking relationships in sequential data. The application of the Transformers model ranges from detecting trend anomalies to preventing fraud to helping hearing-impaired students learn better. 

Under this subject, you will learn about the fundamentals of the Transformers model, its implementations, its comparison with CNN and RNN and its future. 

6.Cloud and MLOps

MLOps or Machine Learning operations use machine learning models used by the DevOps team. MLOps holds great importance in various aspects of AI and ML. It primarily helps in an ML or AI project’s quality assurance, quicker delivery, risk assessment and making the overall process more efficient. 

Under this subject, you will get to know about the best practices of MLOps that include the cloud. Such as naming conventions, checking code quality, tracking experiments, data validation etc. 

Overview of the Machine Learning Course Syllabus

Now that you know what subjects you are going to learn under this course, let us discuss the machine learning syllabus to give you a better understanding of how much and when you would be learning about each of those machine learning subjects. 

So here is a breakdown of the machine learning syllabus. The course is divided into 8 main parts:

1. Data Science Tool kit
2. Statistics & Exploratory Data Analytics
3. Machine Learning-1
4. Machine Learning-2
5. Natural Language Processing
6. Deep Learning
7. Reinforcement Learning
8. Deployment and Capstone Project

Data Science Tool kit

This part is a pre-preparatory course which is essential to start the journey of Data Science and Machine Learning. The major requirements are Python, SQL and Excel as well to some extent.

This part is divided into below 6 modules:

Introduction to Python: This module covers the core Python topics assuming no prior knowledge. Understanding the structure of Python, Data Structures like lists, tuples, dictionaries, etc. is covered.

Python for Data Science: The 2 most important libraries of Python – NumPy and Pandas are covered in depth. NumPy and Pandas are essential for Data Analysis, cleaning and most of the core Data Science work.

Math for Machine Learning: Linear Algebra, Matrices, Multi-Variable Calculus and Vectors are covered in this module. These topics are a pre-requisite for understanding how ML algorithms work.

Data Visualization in Python: This module covers the dynamics of plotting graphs and trends using Python.

• Data Analysis using SQL: SQL is at the core of Data Analysis and Engineering. This module covers the basics of SQL like functions, clauses, queries and joins.

1. Advanced SQL: This module covers more advanced topics like Database design, Window functions, Query Optimization, etc.

Statistics & Exploratory Data Analytics

Statistics and Data go hand in hand. Most of the Data Analysis runs statistical analysis under the hood which can then be explored further to get significant results.

This part covers below 6 modules:

1. Analytics Problem Solving: This module covers the CRISP-DM framework for an overview of a Machine Learning project spanning from business understanding to deployment.
2. Investment Assignment: A Data Analytics assignment as an investment banking firm employee.
3. Inferential Statistics: This module covers the most important statistical concepts like Probability, Probability Distributions and the Central Limit Theorem.
4. Hypothesis Testing: The what, why and hows of Hypothesis Testing are covered in this module. P-Value, different types of tests and implementation in Python.
5. Exploratory Data Analysis: EDA brings out the information from the Data. This module covers Data Cleaning, Univariate/Bivariate analysis and derived metrics for ML.
6. Group Project: Lending Club Case Study to find out which customers are at risk of defaulting loans.

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Machine Learning-1

This part covers the basics of Machine Learning and some algorithms. It is essential to have a comprehensive knowledge of these before diving into more advanced topics.

It consists of 5 modules:

1. Linear Regression: This module covers the basics of linear regression, its assumptions, limitations and industry applications.
2. Linear Regression Assessment: A car price prediction assignment.
3. Logistic Regression: Univariate and Multivariate Logistic Regression for classification ML. Implementation in Python, evaluation metrics and industry applications are covered.
4. Naive Bayes: One of the easiest and most effective classification algorithms. This module covers the basics of Bayes Theorem, Naive Bayes classifier and implementation in a Spam-Ham classifier.
5. Model Selection: This module covers the model selection, Bias-Variance Tradeoff, Hyperparameter Tuning and Cross-Validation which are necessary to finalize the best ML model.

Machine Learning-2

This part covers more advanced topics of Machine Learning. It consists of different types of supervised and unsupervised algorithms.

The 8 modules covered are:

1. Advanced Regression: This module introduces the Generalized Linear Regression and Regularized Regression techniques like Ridge and Lasso.
2. Support Vector Machine (Optional): This module covers the SVM algorithm, its working, kernels and implementation.
3. Tree Models: Basics of Tree models, their structure, splitting techniques, pruning and ensembles to form Random Forests are covered here.
4. Model Selection-Practical Considerations: This module gives a hands-on for using model selection techniques to select the best model.
5. Boosting: What are weak learners and string learners, and how can they be joined together to form a great model. Various Boosting techniques are covered here.
6. Unsupervised Learning-Clustering: This module introduces Clustering, its types and implementation from scratch.
7. Unsupervised Learning-Principal Component Analysis: This covers the basics of PCA, its working and implementation in Python.
8. Telecom Churn Case Study: Case Study to predict Customer Churn for a telecom operator.

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Natural Language Processing

Natural Language Processing(NLP) is in itself a huge field. In this NLP part, all the building blocks of text data handling are covered along with chatbots.

The 5 modules included are:

1. Lexical Processing: This module covers the basics of NLP like text encoding, Regular Expressions, text processing techniques and advanced lexical techniques like Phonetic Hashing.
2. Syntactic Processing: This module covers the basics of Syntactic Processing, different types of text parsing, Information Extraction and Conditional Random Fields.
3. Syntactic Processing-Assignment: Implementing Syntactic processing to understand the grammatical structure of the text.
4. Semantic Processing: This module introduces Semantic Processing, Word vectors and embeddings, Topic Modelling techniques followed by a case study.
5. Building Chatbots with Rasa: This module covers the hottest tool for chatbot development along with implementation.

Deep Learning

Deep Learning is widely used in the industry in many cutting edge applications for various types of data. In this part, all the types of Neural Networks are covered along with implementation.

The 5 modules covered are:

1. Introduction to Neural Networks: This module covers the basics of Neural Networks, activation functions and the Feed Forward network.
2. Convolutional Neural Network-Industry Applications: This module covers in detail the CNN, its structure, layers and working. It also covers various Transfer Learning models, Style Transfer and Data pre-processing of image data followed by a case study.
3. Neural Networks-Assignment: A CNN based case study.
4. Recurrent Neural Networks: This module covers another type of neural networks specially used for sequence-based data – RNN and LSTM along with their implementations.
5. Neural Networks Project: In this module, you’ll be doing a Gesture Recognition project using CNNs and RNNs network stacks.

Reinforcement Learning

In this part, we introduce you to another type of Machine Learning – Reinforcement Learning. You’ll learn the basics including the classical reinforcement learning as well as Deep Reinforcement Learning.

This part covers below 4 modules:

1. Classical Reinforcement Learning: This module covers the basics of RL like Markov Decision Process, RL Equations as well as Monte Carlo Methods.
2. Assignment-Classical Reinforcement Learning: A tic-tac-toe assignment using RL.
3. Deep Reinforcement Learning: In this module, we’ll dive into Deep Q Networks, their architecture and implementation. It also covers more advanced topics like Policy Gradient Methods and Actor-Critic Methods.
4. Reinforcement Learning Project: An assignment to be done using RL architecture.

Capstone Project

In this part, you will make your final capstone project using all the knowledge gained so far.

This part is divided into 2 modules:

1. Deployment: This module covers the later stage of a Machine Learning project where you’ll learn the deployment basics on cloud and PaaS, as well as CI/CD pipelines and Docker basics.
2. Capstone: The final capstone project to make your resume and portfolio skyrocket.

Before You Go

This program covers all the required basics and advanced tools and skills to enter the Data Science and Machine Learning Industry. You’ll be going through a sufficient amount of practicals and projects to make sure you’ve learnt well.

With all the learnt skills you can get active on other competitive platforms as well to test your skills and get even more hands-on.

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