Teaching machine learning from examples

We used the datasets of the NIPS 2003 challenge on feature selection as part of the practical work of an undergraduate course on feature extraction. The students were provided with a toolkit implemented in Matlab. Part of the course requirements was that they should outperform given baseline methods. The results were beyond expectations: the student matched or exceeded the performance of the best challenge entries and achieved very effective feature selection with simple methods. We make available to the community the results of this experiment and the corresponding teaching material [16].