Course Announcement for Spring 2009
CSCE 970: Pattern Recognition
(with an emphasis on graphical models)

Instructor:

Stephen Scott
Avery 268
sscott AT cse
http://www.cse.unl.edu/~sscott/
Previous offering: http://cse.unl.edu/~sscott/teach/Classes/cse970S07/

Meeting Time: 10:30-11:20 Mon/Wed/Fri in Avery 112

Track Classification: This course applies towards Applications track requirements for all graduate programs in Computer Science.

Credits: 3 units

Prerequisites: Math 314 (Linear Algebra), CSCE 310 (Data Structures & Algorithms), STAT 380 (Prob. and Stats.), or equivalent experiences

Required Textbook: Learning Bayesian Networks by Richard E. Neapolitan, Prentice Hall, 2004. ISBN 0-13-012534-2

Course Description:

Pattern recognition is concerned with the question of how to automatically detect subtle patterns in data. Pattern recognition has for many years been applied to numerous areas, including computer vision, signal processing, bioinformatics, data mining, and many more.

In this course you will learn several of the fundamentals and current trends in pattern recognition, with an emphasis on so-called "graphical models" such as Bayesian networks and hidden Markov models. These models are rigorously justified, provide a distributed knowledge representation, and are as understandable as a rule base. They deal particularly well with uncertainty, and they can be manually generated by consultation of an expert, or inductively built by machine learning. These approaches are used for modelling knowledge in gene regulatory networks, medicine, engineering, text analysis, image processing, data fusion, and decision support systems. A sampling of specific applications includes (1) automatic interpolation of raw data from interplanetary probes and deep space explorations; (2) modeling pilot-aircraft interactions; (3) the "Office Assistant" that was introduced in the Office 95 suite of desktop products; and (4) modeling of DNA and protein sequences.

Grades in this course will be based on homework exercises, written and oral presentations, and a project.



Last modified 16 August 2011; please report problems to sscott AT cse.