There are many error in the implementations for octave. Aside from that, the course is fine

Covers some material a little too quickly, but overall a good and entertaining course.

A bit more challenging than I thought but very useful, and very well structured

Great and well paced content.

Quizzes really helps nailing the tricky points.

Instructor is engaging in her delivery. Topic is interesting but difficult.

Honors seems like a must to full instill concepts/implementation

I would recommend adding some supplemental reading material.

Rich content and useful tools for applying in real problems

Please, provide programming assignments on Python or C++

Theory: Very interesting. Assignments: not so useful.

Five stars minus the week 4 coding homework

More feedback from TA would be appreciated

Writing on the ppt is not clear to see.

lectures are too fast otherwise great

Broad introduction to general issues

Lack of top-down review of the PGM.

Great intro to probabilistic models

Excellent

too hard

Good

ok

I found plenty of useful information in this course overall but lectures often spent too much time dwelling on the detail of simpler concepts while more complex areas, and sometimes critical information that was later built upon, were only touched briefly or sometimes skipped entirely. I missed a sense of continuity as we skipped from model to model with a minimum of time spent on how the models complement each other and their relative strengths and weaknesses in application.

The way data structures were defined in the code was particularly difficult to deal with. The coding exercises all suffered as a result. It ended up taking way too much time to figure how to decode the data and trace logic around it. This meant that grasping concepts and learning from the questions came in a distant second priority to debugging.

Dr Koller mentioned that the material is aimed at postgraduates. I felt that the level of content covered here would just as easily be grasped by most undergraduates in technical disciplines if it had been delivered in a more structured manner with clearer progression across models (conceptually and mathematically) and better code examples. When delivering in this format, allowances need to be made for the facts that tutorial sessions do not exist and the possibilities for informal Q&A are limited so any gaps become very difficult for students to fill in themselves.

Despite the above shortcomings I'm glad I did the course and I would still recommend it to someone interested in graphical models as it does cover the basics well enough to make a decent start. I'm not sure whether or not I'd recommend the programming exercises as they are a significant time sink but at the same time, without spending time attacking the programming problems the concepts are not likely to gel based on the video and quizzes alone.

The course was very interesting and thought-provoking. I found the introduction to probabilistic graphical models (PGMs) and their properties struck a nice balance between intuition and formalism. The discussions highlighted exciting aspects of their power in simplifying complex problems involving uncertainty. However, I still do not feel I could propose convincing PGMs for real-world problems. There are examples in the course, but they are far removed from being concrete applications. I would have preferred there be an in depth analysis of an application of PGMs in the literature over the lengthy programming assignments. I am an experienced programmer with over 5 years of experience in many languages including MATLAB/Octave and I sometimes found it uninspiring to solve toy problems, not due to the difficulty in using the programming language, but rather because after the assignment had been completed I felt I had not really learnt much more than I would have from just watching the lectures, although, if you are interested in getting experience with MATLAB/Octave, the programming assignments are good practice. I qualify this in stating that I have not yet completed the next two courses on PGMs; this course may present an essential foundation that is necessary for the upcoming courses, and in any case provoked my interest in learning more about them

The course is highly theoretical. Would have been great if it was paced well and driven from real world examples. I am not saying that there are no examples. But it'd have been better if the concepts were driven via some real world examples instead of first talking about the concept and then its applications.

What would have been even better if Python was an option for PAs. Octave can't be used in industry setting where the amount of data is really large. Both Python and Octave should have been an option so that the student can decide for themself.

Lectures were OK and quizzes and exams appropriately difficult. But Labs were pretty difficult especially lab 4 which I ended up surrendering on. This means I didn't do the accompanying quiz and gave up on the possibility of honors recognition as well.

While labs don't have to be as hand-holding as the DeepLearning class by Coursera, it would be nice to get more help and maybe not submit errors for the parts I haven't tackled yet when submitting (as DeepLearning and MachineLearning courses figured out how to do).