Math 565: Lecture Notes and Videos on Optimization for Machine Learning

Copyright: I (Bala Krishnamoorthy) hold the copyright for all lecture scribes/notes, documents, and other materials including videos posted on these course web pages. These materials might not be used for commercial purposes without my consent.

Scribes from all lectures so far (as a single big file)

Lec Date Topic(s) Scribe Video
1 Jan 13 syllabus, logistics, ML problems: clustering, classification, regression, optimization in 1D, regression via minimization Scb1 Vid1
2 Jan 15 \(\nabla J = \mathbf{0} \Rightarrow D^TD \mathbf{w} = D^T \mathbf{y}\), optimization in graphs, using \(D = QR\), Tikhonov regularization, binary classification Scb2 Vid2
3 Jan 20 support vector machine (SVM), Taylor expansion, local optimality in 1D, gradient descent (python), optimality in \(d\)-dim Scb3 Vid3
4 Jan 22 local optimality: second order conditions, convex (cvx) sets + functions, properties, \(f(g(\mathbf{w}))\) cvx when \(f\) cvx + \(g\) linear Scb4 Vid4
5 Jan 27 local min of cvx \(f \Rightarrow\) global min, first+second derivative cndn of convexity, strict convexity, computing \(\nabla J\), updating \(\alpha_t\) Scb5 Vid5
6 Jan 29 second order cndtns example, line search for \(\alpha_t\), additively separable loss \(J\)\(=\)\(\sum_i J_i\), stochastic gradient descent (SGD) Scb6 Vid6


Last modified: Tue Jan 27 23:22:18 PST 2026