Learner Reviews & Feedback for Machine Learning: Clustering & Retrieval by University of Washington
About the Course
Top reviews
PJ
Oct 27, 2017
A great course to understand clustering as well as text mining. Lectures on KDD and LSH are equally important to understand and implement these algo . Many thanks
NP
Dec 15, 2019
Excellent course. I liked the material and the assignments are great to consolidate the learning. I really liked the recap videos to solidify even more what I learned.
376 - 391 of 391 Reviews for Machine Learning: Clustering & Retrieval
By Volker H
•Jul 18, 2016
please rework in particular week 5, part 2
By Nicolas I
•Aug 31, 2016
A little too superficial and hand waving.
By Harsh A
•Jul 18, 2018
Too little "case-study" approach
By Sutapa K
•Jul 5, 2023
video lecture is not running
By Stuart L
•Aug 30, 2016
the homework is getting easy
By Rohan L
•Aug 29, 2020
I leave 2 stars as I learned a lot of new information and methods, and the theory and math behind them.
You will learn about Data Science and Machine Learning, but not much about Python.
The course is pretty much abandoned and outdated. Sframes and Turicreate packages (instructor's creations) are used instead of more universal packages. Installation in the beginning took some time and research. Many of the assignments have errors and bugs in the code that have not been updated. Forum assistance is abysmal for clarification or deeper questions. Many links are dead.
There are many times in the lectures where the instructors are writing several sentences in their handwriting on their notes instead of having the text ready to appear.
I would suggest using this course and series as a supplement to other information one as learned, not as an introduction for initial understanding. I found myself frustrated too many times.
By Ryan M
•Sep 16, 2020
While the topics covered in this course are arguably more complex than those in other courses in the Machine Learning specialization, I felt that the instructor did not do a good job covering the complicated material. There is a lot of statistics in this course, and the instructor seemed to assume that students would know many of the statistical terms and concepts without explaining them. I had to use a ton of outside resources to augment the videos presented as part of this course.
Furthermore, many of the assignments seemed to have errors in them. For the last programming assignment, there is no correct answer for at least one of the questions. Since there is no support from instructional staff or Coursera, this is a bit frustrating. Luckily you could pass the quiz without even answering that specific question.
By Pan W
•Jan 3, 2017
I give 5 star for the teacher, really approach having such a well-organized teaching material.
I also give -1 star for the homework assignment and its (almost) GraphLab only approach. Yes, it mentioned "alternative" approach (which is much more popular than GraphLab), but there are many bugs & trivial difficulties to get it through. With scikit-learn as a great open source package, the only reason (I suspect) to choose GraphLab is commercial purpose. For me, if the homework assignment is only instructed properly for loading data into Pandas, I can finish each programming assignment within 1 hour for sure using scikit learn; but now, it takes 30 minutes and I still cannot load the data correctly. I like to get a certificate, but it is not necessary and spending too much time is a waste on my time.
By ryan
•Sep 23, 2017
requires use of a programming library from a company that was sold and is unmaintained. Challenging to build the environment to run the homework code on my mac pro. An AMI is provided so you can try to do the assignments on a prebuilt machine. Anyway I've found the class quite a hassle.
By SHAHAPURKAR S M
•Jun 19, 2020
Course content is good but assignments are too lengthy and directions are not clear. Also, no support has been provided for non TuriCreate users. Students face a hard time in figuring out the Scikit-Learn implementations of the functions provided in the notebooks.
By Nour e h M
•Oct 29, 2025
⚠️ Failure to complete the final assessment due to critical technical bugs. The course content itself is good, but I am forced to give a 1-star rating because it is impossible to finish. The Module 5 LDA Modeling Quiz CLU05-NB01is critically flawed:Unusable Notebook. The provided Notebook interface is broken, making code execution impossible. Obsolete Software Requirement: The core code requires the outdated Turi Create library, which is only compatible withPython 2.7. This makes it technically impossible to execute the necessary calculations for questions Q2, Q11, and Q12 on any modern system. Support Failure: I submitted an urgent support request regarding this bug, but the support team closed my case without providing a solution.The assessment is technically infeasible (requires an 80\% passing grade). The quality and completion of this course are compromised by this major software failure. I request manual validation so my hard work is not lost.
By Karl S
•Oct 11, 2016
For me, this course was disappointing. Here is why: First, the level, at which the course material is presented, is very low. It might be freshman level, but certainly not more. There are many buzzwords but no real explanations. The programming assignments are only doable because most of the work has been done by the people designing the assignments. There is very little left for the students. Furthermore, the procedures, that are already given, are not very well documented. Hence, a lot of guess work is required to figure out how things should work. Furthermore, little effort has been spent to structure the procedures that are already given. Altogether, this makes doing the programming assignments very unsatisfying.
Finally, the professor presenting the materials does not take part in the discussion forums. Contrary to other courses that I have attended at Coursera, this time the discussion forum was no help at all.
By Ricardo Y N
•Aug 17, 2020
some exercises only works if you have a Linux or MacOS, you could not resolve them if you have windows, the explanations are ok, I've never had an anwswer for my questions or issues on hte forum
By Kripakaran R
•Nov 12, 2018
I wish week4 and week5 were better. It felt so rushed, where most of the important things were covered.
By Andreas
•Jan 4, 2017
This specialization is delayed for months now - very annoying! Don't give them money!
By Adrien L
•Feb 2, 2017
No good without the missing course and capstone projects