
Improving Deep Neural Networks: Hyperparameter Tuning, Regularization and Optimization
DeepLearning.AI · View on Coursera ↗
Taught by Andrew Ng, Kian Katanforoosh, Younes Bensouda Mourri
Data ScienceComputer Science
About the course
In the second course of the Deep Learning Specialization, you will open the deep learning black box to understand the processes that drive performance and generate good results systematically. By the end, you will learn the best practices to train and develop test sets and analyze bias/variance for building deep learning applications; be able to use standard neural network techniques such as initialization, L2 and dropout regularization, hyperparameter tuning, batch normalization, and gradient
The dissent
The most-upvoted critical review (104 votes, 1.0★).
“Walking away from this course, I do *not* feel adequately prepared to implement (end-to-end) everything that I've learned. I felt this way after the first course of this series, but even more so now. Yes, I understand the material, but the programming assignments really don't amount to more than "filling in the blanks"--that doesn't really test whether or not I've mastered the material. I understand that this is terribly hard to accomplish through a MOOC, and having taught university-level courses myself, I understand how much effort is involved in doing so in the "real world". In either case, if I'm paying for a course, I expect to have a solid grasp on the material after completing the material, and though you've clearly put effort into assembling the programming exercises, they don't really gauge this on any level. Perhaps it would be worth considering a higher cost of the course in order to justify the level of effort required to put together assessments that genuinely put the student through their paces in order to assure that a "100%" mark genuinely reflects both to you and the learner that they have truly internalized and mastered the material. …”
Excerpt. Read the full review on Coursera ↗
Coursera's 4.9 comes from 63,556 ratings. Of those, 0.2% are 1–2★.
Starisk reads the reviews learners voted most helpful, and weights each by the square root of its votes: a review with 80 upvotes counts about five times one with 2. Unvoted reviews are not skipped out of laziness — by this model they carry no evidence that other students endorsed them.
That measures what the most-endorsed reviews say, not “true quality.” The rating distribution above is the whole population, so you can see the sample next to it.
Reviews read on 23 Oct 2026.Read them on Coursera ↗