Welcome to Gov 2018 - Introduction to Machine Learning.

In this course, we will explore this universe of ML modeling strategies—their motivation, properties, and manner of implementation. Models examined will include tree-based methods, convolutional neural networks, machine learning approaches for social networks, time series network models, ensembles, and probabilistic machine learning.

We will interrogate how these strategies can be used to support social science inquiry. We will also examine topics at the intersection of social science and ML related to fairness, privacy, and the implications of ML for politics and society. By the end of the course, students should be able to employ state-of-the-art machine learning methods in their research and policy applications, understand the strengths and limitations of these methods, and know how to modify the proposed methods to maintain legal compliance, privacy, and ethics.