Mathematics for Machine Learning: PCA
Imperial College London · View on Coursera ↗
Taught by Marc Peter Deisenroth
Data ScienceMath and Logic
About the course
This intermediate-level course introduces the mathematical foundations to derive Principal Component Analysis (PCA), a fundamental dimensionality reduction technique. We'll cover some basic statistics of data sets, such as mean values and variances, we'll compute distances and angles between vectors using inner products and derive orthogonal projections of data onto lower-dimensional subspaces. Using all these tools, we'll then derive PCA as a method that minimizes the average squared reconstruc
The dissent
The most-upvoted critical review (127 votes, 1.0★).
“This course does not include real-world examples as compared with other 2 courses in the series. The other lecturers energy was quite obvious and the lecturer in this course does nothing extra. This is the traditional teaching method where we should keep on grasping theory without understanding applications.”
Coursera's 4.0 comes from 3,191 ratings. Of those, 13.8% 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 ↗