Some tutorials need disambiguating documentation (upgrade :)) but otherwise, the course is really good. It would also help if there is a mention of what chapters to study from the book for every lesson -- in the slides.

The materials are very interesting, however, this professor speaks so fast that it is hard to grasp the deep theory. In overall, this course is great. And I really need to do the assignment to enhance my comprehension about the content.

Lack of top-down review of the PGM.

Rich content and useful tools for applying in real problems

The course is pretty good. I love the way that the professor led us into the graphical models.

Thanks to this course, Probabilistic Graphical Models are not anymore an esoteric subject! I am really looking for the second part of the course.

I really enjoyed this course. Prof Koller presents the material very well, and it's really interesting to see how probabilistic graphical model frameworks are underpinned mathematically. I thought it was a pretty tough course at points, and while the lectures are good I found having a copy of Prof Koller's textbook very useful.

I would give this course 5 stars, but I thought some of the programming assignments involved too much grappling with MATLAB rather than illuminating the principles in the lectures. Also, I think the order of the lectures may have been changed since the course was first run as there are occasional references to things that have not been covered at that point.

Overall though, very enjoyable. I'm looking forward to parts 2 and 3.

Great material. Course mentors are nowhere to be found and some of the problems are hard, so I'd have liked to see some guidance.

The course is great with plenty of knowledge. A little defect is about description about assignment. As the forum discussed, several quizzes may confusing.

The course helps me understand what a probabilistic graphical model is and how and why it works. One aspect I like the most about the course is the programming assignments. Those PA really make a lot of concepts clearer although sometimes you need to think carefully when the instruction is hard to follow. I think there should be more test case and expected results so that students know what is asked and to evaluate their own code. The instructor is generally clear but sometimes she goes too fast on certain concept. The course is hard but if you gives in time and effort you can complete it.

More feedback from TA would be appreciated

A good introduction to PGM, from very basic concepts to some move in-depth features. A big disadvantage is Matlab/Octave programming assignments.

I wish I could give 4 and a half star to this course.

On the positive side : there is a lot of value in this course. Professor Koller succeeds in introducing us to PGM representations in a few weeks. IMHO, one should really do all the exercices "for a mention". Without them, this course lacks "hands on" sessions, and is much less interesting. Most programming exercises are great, and the companion quiz are really a plus.

When I followed Professor Ng programming exercises, I was both delighted and frustrated. Delighted because I learned a lot of things. Frustrated because it was sometimes really too easy.

This is not the case for most exercices there. I find them so well prepared, so crafted that I often learned a lot of my first wrong submissions of quiz of programming exercices.

On the negative side : the quality of the sound recordings is sometimes not really good. That is especially true in the first videos. That should not stop you from following this great course ! Some programming exercices were a bit frustrating because their difficulty is more in knowing octave tips and tricks than in PGM. In addition, and this is more embarassing, some exercices do not work, like in Markov Network for OCR https://www.coursera.org/learn/probabilistic-graphical-models/programming/dZmtj/markov-networks-for-ocr I had, as other students, to disable some features and to blindly submit my ansmwers.

Also, some exercises were difficult for me because of very precise English. I guess it might be difficult for native speakers to handle that, but as this course seems to have an international audience, it would be great.

I feel that raising this great course from 4 stars to 5 stars would not require much efforts. Prepare better recordings of the few videos that have really bad sound. Correct those small bugs in exercises. Simplify some English wordings.

I, however, advise this course to all persons interested in this field. And I intend to follow the next course, on inference.

The video lectures are really good and are useful for guiding you through Probabilistic Graphical Models book. I did not like the honor track programming exercises, however. The problems seems artificial to me and they make use of very strange data structures (probably due to the adoption of matlab as programming language). You end up wasting a lot of time with unimportant points instead of exploring ideas and getting cool results. Furthermore, I don't think the programming exercises help to familiarize the user to any of standard tools for bayesian analysis (i.e. probabilistic programming languages and so on).

Excellent course. The video lectures are challenging (had to keep my finger on the pause key) even if you're familiar with the math, since the instructor encapsulates concepts in an amazingly concise manner. This pays off with a lot of "Aha!" moments as strong concepts are combined to create insights, especially starting around week 3. I'm already in love with this subject after 1 part

It would have been nice to have more worked homework problems, since this is a math course. But, this is not necessary to pass the class or understand the concepts. I've purchased Prof Koller's text on PGM and hope to solidify some of the intuitions I'm missing shortly.

Taking off a star because the test cases and grading software for the honors homework assessments were clearly low effort and sometimes incorrect. There were a lot of cases where functions passed all the provided and automatic test cases despite major flaws (e.g. not working for any cases besides n=1), which made it difficult to tell if things worked since the programming style is unique. The homework itself was super interesting and valuable, but I probably spent over 50% of the time fighting the grader instead of learning stuff. Given that I'm a professional programmer and completed most of the homework in 25-50% of the estimated time, I'm guessing that the average student wasted even more time with issues that are ultimately unrelated to our understanding of PGM.

Good course. Sometimes a little bit hard to follow. For example representation of probability functions as graphs (connection between factorisation of probabilty distribution and cliques in the graph). And I'm not sure If I can apply PGMs to real world problems now.

Some of the examples are a bit confusing. I mostly used logic to solve these versus following a formula. Octave was fine but I didn't know how to use SAMIAM and so gave up on the coding assignments since PGMs aren't a focus area for me except for general theoretical knowledge.

In general this is a good introductory course. You should read the book if you want more in-depth knowledge in this field. I feel that some of the concepts can be expanded a little more, like local structure in Markov model. Overall, this is a great course.

Great course, however, the honors track assignments are a bit too tedious and take lots of time.

Very good course. It should contain more practical examples to make the material better to understand.

Before I took this course I took the Stanford Machine Learning course, which I greatly enjoyed. That course allows for the learning of difficult concepts in a way that I found less painful than working through a textbook. In this course there is a lot less video content, and the coding assignments are less interesting. Expect to spend a lot of time understanding the nuances of the code that the instructional team has developed, and be prepared to really pore over the gritty aspects of Octave or MATLAB. If you're serious about this course I suggest buying the accompanying book. The slides are not easy to understand without the audio narration, which makes them difficult to review, and unlike the case in the ML course, there are not a lot of readily available open introductions written on the topics.

Wonderful course with great material. Wish there were more examples in the material. Nonetheless cannot complain to get this course for free with SEE material and programming assignments (need to complete yet in this session)

Excellent

This specialization covers a lot of concepts and programming assignments which are very helpful in understanding the concepts clearly. Although, I wish there is some form of explanation for the programming assignments.

Good course, quite complex, wish some better quality slides, and more quizzes to help understand the theory