ML_course_maastricht

Introduction to Machine Learning for Policy Analysis (Maastricht 2024)

Welcome

Dear Students, welcome to the course repository, where you will find all informations supplementing this term’s machine learning for policy analysis course. Here you will find the lectures on the two topics introduced (Supervised Machine Learning & Natural Language Processing) in video format plus facilitating rmarkdown notebooks.

To get the most out of this lectures, I expect you to have R & R-Studio installed and updated on your local machine, and to be generally used to do data analytics in R using the ´tidyverse´ ecosystem. If that is not the case, you might want to take a look at the adittional resoures such as ´My R Brush-up course (Bonus)´ below, where I recap the fundamentals of working with data in R.

::::::::::::::> Watch this intro video to get started <:::::::::::::::::

Lecturer (briefly about me)

Daniel is an Strategic Business Manager at NovoNordisk, where his team develops data driven methods and workflows to improve the performance of clinical trials. He is also an Associate Professor in Data Science & Innovation Economics at the Aalborg University Business School, where he was leading the Data Science research track at the AI:Growth lab, and coordinated teaching at the Social Data Science (SDS) master specialization. His research is dedicated to the development and application of data-driven methods to map, understand, and predict technological change, and its causes and consequences for socioeconomic systems on various levels of aggregation. His current contextual focus is the dynamics of AI research and industry.

His research is featured in leading academic journals such as Research Policy, but also attracted attention and funding from the industry, and lead to price-winning applications. Daniel is actively engaged in initiatives to educate (social science) students and researchers, professionals, and policymakers in understanding, evaluating, and applying modern Data Science and Artificial Intelligence methods for data-driven decision making.

As part of the AI:DK project, he coordinates and leads AI proof-of-concept projects within industry. His team also develops enterprise and policy software solutions for IP search and technology mapping.

Lectures

Legend:

Introduction to Supervised Machine Learning (S-ML) in R

This part will introduce you to the fundamentals of supervised machine learning (SML, aka. predictive modelling), and illustrate practical applications theeof in R.

Introduction to Natural-Language-Processing (NLP) in R

In this part you will be introduced to the fundamentals of analysing textual data, and the practical application in R. After reviwing the basics of string manipulation, we will move to bag-of-word style text summaries, and move on to slightly more advanced applications such as sentiment analysis and topic modelling.

Further Resources

Find below a list of further resources (including own material), either to brush-up basic R knowledge, supplement what you learn here, or dive deeper into related or advanced topics.

Own research: Technology forecasting with ML & NLP

Data Science in R in general

Supervised Machine Learning

Natural Language Processing

Further topics of (potential) interest

My R Brush-up course (Bonus)

As a bonus, find some very basic introductions to working with data in R (from another course of mine) below. If you are already used to work with R and the tidyverse, no need to do so. But in case you feel your R skills need a bit of a brush up, feel free to go through the material before auditing my classes.