Courses Taught by Dr. Riad Sonbol

Machine Learning (Damascus University)

Faculty of Information Technology Engineering - Department of Artificial Intelligence

[Last Updated: 2026] This course introduces fundamental and advanced concepts in machine learning, covering classical machine learning and advanced deep learning methods.

Lectures & Materials

Lecture No. Title Description Download
Lec 1 Introduction to Machine Learning Overview of machine learning paradigms, key applications, and fundamental challenges. 📥 PDF
Lec 2 Decision Trees Principles of decision trees, feature splitting, tree construction, Decision Tree Decision Boundaries, practical challenges 📥 PDF
Lec 3 Estimation Strategy and Evaluation Metrics Estimation Strategy (Holdeout method, K-Fold Cross Validation, LOOV), and Evaluation Metrics (Precision, Recall, F1, Sensitivity vs Specificity, The Area Under the Curve, Precision-Recall curve). 📥 PDF
Lec 4 Feature Engineering Feature Preprocessing, Feature Selection, Feature Extraction (Univariate feature selection, Multivariate feature selection) 📥 PDF
Lec 5 Support Vector Machines (SVM) Intuitions, SVM Optimization, Soft Margin SVM (C Hyper-Parameters), Gamma Hyper-Parameters, The Kernel Trick, Multiclass classification (One-against-all, One-vs-one), Feature scaling 📥 PDF
Lec 6 KNN and NB Fundamentals of K-Nearest Neighbors and Naive Bayes classifiers with practical use cases. 📥 PDF
Lec 7 Practical Concerns for Machine Learning 1 Generalization, Overfitting, underfitting, and bias-variance tradeoff 📥 PDF
Lec 8 Practical Concerns for Machine Learning 2 Ensemble Methods, Imbalanced Dataset handling 📥 PDF
Lec 9 Introduction to Deep Learning Training , Optimization, and Regularization 📥 PDF
Lec 10 Well Known DL Architecture (till 2016) CNN, RNN, LSTM 📥 PDF
Lec 11 Transformers Transformers, attention mechanism, encoder part, decoder part, masked attention, cross attention 📥 PDF