The CS5100 learning path
Weeks 1 to 4 as one guided route: short lessons, worked examples, interactive demos and exam-style questions. Each step opens when you pass the checkpoint before it, and each stage opens when you pass the test at the end of the one before.
How it works
- Steps. Every stage is a handful of short steps. Read a step, try its worked example on paper, then answer its checkpoint. The next step stays locked until you get the checkpoint right. Wrong twice and you see the full working, then you try again.
- Stage tests. Each stage ends with a test marked all at once, like a real paper. You need 80% to unlock the next stage (70% for the final mock exam). Retake as often as you like; questions marked fresh numbers change every attempt, so you can’t just memorise the answers.
- Exam-style written questions. The papers ask you to explain, write the formula and discuss flexibility. For those you write your answer, reveal the model answer, and tick the mark-scheme points you actually made. Be honest: it’s your exam.
- Already know a stage? Every stage has a button to jump straight to its test. Passing the test is all that counts.
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The route
What the route is built from
- The week 1 to 4 slides (N. Colombo) and the lab notebooks: every stage follows the slides’ order and notation, and points out the slide typos the study guides found.
- The ISLP chapters for each week. Every stage starts with a box saying which book sections to read and which to skip, because the chapters contain much more than the course uses.
- The 2023, 2024 and 2025 past papers. The written questions use the five exam formats (explain with an example, write the formula, discuss flexibility, true/false with a reason, and a small hand calculation), and every past calculation from weeks 1 to 4 appears somewhere on the route, usually as a fresh-numbers drill.
What isn’t here yet
The second half of the paper (in past years: bagging and out-of-bag error, boosting, clustering, PCA, multiple testing, PageRank, tf-idf) depends on lectures you haven’t had yet. Those stages will be added as the weeks arrive. The out-of-bag calculation is the single most repeated past question, so expect a stage for it as soon as bagging is taught.