Learner Reviews & Feedback for Mathematics for Machine Learning: PCA by Imperial College London

This has to be one of most nightmarish, ugly, courses I have taken on the Coursera platform. Lousy, boring instructor, assignments that are so full of bugs that even the staff cannot resolve the issues. Add to that very low participation from the mentors and teaching staff in responding to student concerns and questions.

Hey Marc, teaching staff and Imperial College. Get your act together!!

IOW This course sucks big time! Take it at your own risk

I'm sorry but it is hard to understand. My expectation before starting this course is I'll be able to understand mathematic in an easier and better way but this is too complex to understand. I think you need to simplify this or make the course in a more fun way. Other than that, the course give me so much knowledge and it was so fun to learn all of these even though it require most of my time

The course is very monotonic and boring and it is quite difficult to understand much of what the extremely mathematical terms that the instructor does. I am an M.Sc. Mathematics student and even I could not understand nor enjoy more than half of the course. I would strongly advise against taking this course, however the other two courses from this specialization are good and interesting.

Feedback for the assignments sucks! The discussion forums don't help. I have to submit the last assignment last 6 times until it work, and I still don't know why my previous versions didn't pass. Other than that, the lectures are actually very good, but the only one worth the time is the fourth one, the other three are just the first course (Linear Algebra) all over again.

Mathematical concepts are clear, but no explanation how to apply them to python to solve machine learning ussies. But you need this for python assignments.

Scripts checking assignments work uncorrectly such a way that one can submit the same piece of working(!) code and get 0/10 and then submit the same code and get 10/10.

All in all, it's very annoying and disappointing.

I was expecting to learn a lot in this course. I did not. The lectures don't really explain much at all and then you're thrown a quizzes and assignments that do not match what was in the actual lectures. The rest of the specialization was great but this course falls of the other two.The explanations in the videos are very poor. Really disappointed.

The course is mathematics for Machine Learning. Yet, they require that you are proficient in python. I understand the mathematics. However, no one will answer my questions on the python we are suppose to code. I passed both of the previous courses. I've taken and passed Statistics with python on edX. I've very disappointed in this course.

This is the worst course on in this specialization. The instructor is like a robot reading a text book. The material is not well constructed. It's just a bunch of formula after formula, with no intuition. It has a lot of readings, which is annoying in an online course. The programming assignments are challenging, but I found them useful.

There are no numerical examples as the course progresses. The instructor does everything algebraically. As a result I was not able appreciate the practical use of PCA. Later on I saw there are very nice videos in Youtube that illustrate the concept more lucidly using numerical examples. I am disappointed.

Marc Peter Deisenroth jumps too much at the important computation steps. Some steps might be simple to him, but it could be very misleading to students.

Often times, he will just throw out some equations without letting the student know what exactly we are trying to achieve.

Intentionally obtuse. No effort whatsoever is given to helping people learn. The instructors don't answer questions and they admittedly make their lectures hard to understand.

I only took this because there were no other courses on available at the time.

One of the worst online courses I have had. Inconsistent teaching, relaying on students having previous knowledge about Python and rads (where the heck did that come from?), failing to convey what and where this is practically used for.

PCA was my main interest in this specialization, and it felt very rushed and lazy (i.e. important explanations are fully missing, or just done via pdf from a book). I used *a lot* of Khan Academy to understand what's going on.

I would give ONE STAR because the instructor of this course was worst. He don't know the teaching and concepts too. He seems to be so low energetic instructor I have ever seen. A very bad experience after taking this course.

I don't know if this course has been deliberately made hard to understand or I was lacking something. Lectures were pretty useless to me. Coding exercises were not clearly defined. I felt utterly frustrated at times.

You'll likely catch on pretty early that this course will mostly expects you to learn the content elsewhere. You're paying for mostly just for assignments and quizzes which there are far more of than video lectures.

The lectures gave incomplete information for the understanding of the material and the homework assignments. Wish this course was stretched to be a 10 week course so that we can all thoroughly learn the material.

The lessons are not clear and if one wants to learn and understand what is going on with the math/algebra, has to study with other resources, because the videos of this course just throw up info´s on screen.

Definitely, not for beginners. Just as bad as the last one. They need to have more examples, which walk you through the ones like they give you on the homework as well as an example of how to do Python.

There is hardly any co-relation between videos and assignments, while the lectures were at high school level but the assignments were at graduate level. It is high time to revise the course contents.

By far the worst online course that I've ever done. Assignments require a lot of experience in Python, which is not communicated upfront. At the same time, staff doesn't provide any actual support.

You will spend most of your time lost.

Quizes are not clear and ill-prepared.

You will need to spend a lot of time looking for material outside of the course to actually make progress.

1. Not intuitive like first two programs

2. The assignments sometimes jumped concepts and were not cohesive

3. The in-lecture problems seemed rushed through

This course is not like other two, which explain much clearly. When I do the practice quiz and coding, I resort to find other help on the Internet.