This is so painfull to follow. I understand maybe its hard for me and am frustrated. But I wanted to write this so many times and then changed my mind thinking i should be mindfull that am just frustrated etc… and honestly, at some point its to much.
its so hard to follow what being said, the presenter does terrible job at explaining things and its just bad overall. I feel like the point of the course is not to teach you anything or to get the understanding of any of the things its talked about, just to spew out the theory and move on. Thats not what teaching is
Hello! I am your DeepLearning.AI Community Coordinator. I hear your frustration loud and clear, and I want to sincerely thank you for choosing to share this feedback rather than keeping it to yourself. It is completely understandable to feel overwhelmed when the material doesn’t click, especially with a subject as foundational as the Mathematics for Machine Learning specialization.
Our goal is to ensure you feel supported, not just “spewed at” with theory. Your experience is incredibly important to us as we work to make these complex topics more accessible.
If you are open to it, I would love to help you navigate this more effectively:
Finding Support in the Forum
Connect with a Mentor: We have dedicated Mentors in the Forum who specialize in breaking down these exact mathematical concepts. They are there to guide you through the “painful” parts with practical explanations.
“How-to” Category: Check out the “How-to” Category in our Forum for tips on how to best utilize the course resources and community support.
Specific Questions: If there is a particular video or concept where you felt the explanation fell short, please post it in the course-specific category. Our Mentors and staff monitor these closely to provide the clarity that the videos might be missing for you right now.
Please don’t give up. Learning math for AI is a marathon, not a sprint, and the community is here to run it with you. Is there a specific topic or week in the course that is causing the most frustration right now? I’d be happy to point you toward a specific thread or Mentor who can help.
Understand your point of frustration when a topic explained is not at all relatable while learning, I have been in such situations when I just wanted to quit the course, but I took a break when nothing was going through what is being explained.
A fresh start with much more research from my end and mentor support is what got through in learning and helped me through such experience.
So as a mentor of M4ML, please feel free to ask any query or doubts, will try best to address your concern, and hope we as team of learner and mentor can get back for better understanding of topic which is causing frustration for you.
Probability and statistics are some of most conceptual based questions with a given condition which leads to more confusion and frustration, the more we practice with different examples, the more we get better, that’s How I improved my understanding at Probability and statistics.
The problem is there is no added value of going thru this lectures. Yes I can do the exercises myself and research topic on my own, but whats the point of this course then? It is just listing the required syllabus without any extra insight. I would understand the point if the lecturer tried to build our intuition and we would then learn it ourselves but there is none of that here. I can get the same listing of required material using chatbot and dont have to pay for some guy to read it out to me. I dont need basic math, i need someone to explain the concepts in this course to me, build my understanding, not just read out the syllabus
During the 1st week, I had mixed feelings about this course too. I was ready to quit, honestly. But I have plowed on and am now midway through week 3. I find that I have gained some interesting insights. Especially the central limit theorem seems extraordinary and unexpected!
My background: I studied electrical engineering, but I feel like I didn’t learn statistics in my university program. It was just assumed that we knew the basics of statistics.
Now that I am studying machine learning, I wanted to beef up my understanding of statistics and probability. This course is not perfect, but I like the instructor and find his videos engaging.
One observation: I have completed quite a few MOOCs and I also watch a number of educational videos on the web. I generally increase the playback speed to about 1.5x to fit my absorption capability. But in this course where the instructor speaks fairly quickly, I have been hovering around 1x and have even gone to 0.75x during the discussion of the central limit theorem. So this course is an outlier for me!
For anyone who hates this course but wants to learn statistics, it might be worth checking out the course references:
The following books were used as references in this course.
Probability and Statistics (4th Edition) , Morris H. DeGroot, Mark J. Schervish, Pearson, 2011
All of Statistics: A Concise Course in Statistical Inference by Larry Wasserman, Springer, 2010
Probabilistic Machine Learning: An Introduction by Kevin Patrick Murphy. MIT Press, March 2022.
Although you are expressing your frustration, you are still mentioning why you couldn’t understand, so mentors could guide you for better understanding of concepts that caused you to hate the course.
If you are stating you wanted a separate exercise practice of probability and statistics, then please clearly mentioned where you felt the course lack to your expectation, so dlai also takes note of your feedback as well as mentors if can help, will surely guide you through.
From my experience working with students, when something is difficult to understand, it is often an indication that some of the prerequisite knowledge may not be fully in place yet. In such cases, I recommend revisiting the foundational concepts first, and then returning to the more advanced material afterward. This approach usually makes the learning process much smoother and more effective.
Personally, I agree with the subject of this thread. I find this course dreadful. I know the material, it’s just presented very poorly, and a great deal of it is just math tricks that are unrelated to machine learning.