2024 MSU REU Short Course on Machine Learning#
Welcome to the 2024 Physics and Astronomy REU program at Michigan State University. We are all excited to have you join us this year!
This short course will focus on the essential aspects of machine learning that are likely to feature in a variety of research areas that you might interact with. From astrophysics to nuclear physics to physics education, many researchers are using the tools of machine learning to gain insight into essential problems in physics. This course will provide you with the basic tools to get started with machine learning and to begin to explore how these tools might be useful in your own research.
Connecting to the class#
We will meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10am-12pm in BPS 1300
Learning Outcomes#
By the end of this short course, you should be able to:
Read data into a pandas DataFrame
Clean data and impute data (as needed)
Plot data and propose potential models for analysis
Split data into training and testing sets
Build classification and regression models
Evaluate the quality of fitted models
Organization of the Course#
The course will be conducted over the next two-ish weeks. We will meet in 1300 BPS from 10am-12pm EDT. The course will make use of Jupyter notebooks, so you will need to make sure that you have installed the Anaconda distribution of Python with Jupyter or something equivalent. The course is broken down into 6 topics:
May 30th - Introduction to Jupyter Notebooks, Machine Learning, and Working with Data
June 4th - Classifier Problems
June 6th - Regression Problems
June 7th-24th - Independent Pair Project Work
June 25th - Project Discussion and Additional Resources