Princeton University Computer Science Department

Computer Science 511 Foundations of Machine Learning Rob Schapire

Spring 2006

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General Information | Schedule & Readings | Assignments | Final Project

Here are statistics for the homeworks that have been graded so far.

Turning in assignments

All work should be turned in at the end of class, or submitted to me in my office, or put in the envelope by my door if I'm not around.  If you need to turn in an assignment after hours when the upper floors of the CS building are locked, you can instead submit your homework in the envelope outside room 001C in the basement of the CS building.

Please submit hard copy only.

Late policy

All assignments are due at 11:59pm on the due date.

Each student will be allotted seven free days which can be used to turn in homework assignments late without penalty.  For instance, you might choose to turn in HW#1 two days late, HW#4  three days late and HW#6 two days late.  Once your free days are used up, late homeworks will be penalized 20% per day.  (For instance, a homework turned in two days late will receive only 60% credit.)  Homeworks will not be accepted more than five days past the deadline, whether or not free days are being used.  Exceptions to these rules will of course be made for serious illness or other emergency circumstances; in these cases, please contact me as soon as you are aware of the problem.

A weekend, that is, Saturday and Sunday together, count as a single late "day".  For instance, a homework that is due on Thursday but turned in on Sunday would be considered two days late, rather than three.

If you are turning in a late homework after hours when no one is around to accept it, please indicate at the top that it is late, and clearly mark the day and time when it was turned in.  Failure to do so may result in me considering the homework to be submitted at the time when I pick it up (which might be many hours, or even a day or two after when you actually submitted it).

Collaboration

Collaboration on the problem sets is encouraged in this course, subject to the following guidelines:

• Before working with someone else, you should first spend a substantial amount of time trying to arrive at a solution by yourself.  Some of the problems are easier and should be solved individually from start to finish.

• Discussing and solving harder problems with fellow students (who have not already solved it) is allowed and encouraged to the extent that it leads all participants to a better understanding of the problem and the material.  Following such discussions, you should only take away your understanding of the problem; you should not take notes, particularly on anything that might have been written down. This is meant to ensure that you understand the discussion well enough to reproduce its conclusions on your own.  You should also note on your solution who you worked with.

• Needless to say, simply telling the solution to someone else is prohibited, as is showing someone a written solution.

• The final writing of the problem set must be done individually and strictly on your own.

• If you happen to have already seen one of the assigned problems elsewhere, please indicate this when you write up your solution; I won't take off credit, I just would like to know.  However, although background reading is always encouraged, you should not attempt to "solve" these problems by looking for the solutions in the literature.  Try to solve the problems on your own, or ask me or fellow students for help if you can't.