InterviewsVector
Capability spine

Arc 03 · AI Engineer

Learning Systems and Classical ML

Build the discipline that still governs foundation-model products: splits, baselines, leakage control, calibration, drift, and causal humility.

Exit capability: Ship and defend a supervised learning system with trustworthy evaluation.

Mapped lessons
7
Published now
7
Full-arc estimate
15 hours
Last edited
2026-08-20

Lesson sequence

Live units open into complete labs. Planned units stay visible to show the dependency path, but intentionally have no detail route. A withdrawn unit is retained only at its previously advertised URL and is not presented as live.

  1. 01

    The Generalization Contract

    Live

    Define the population, decision, loss, and evidence under which performance is expected to transfer.

    Concept labFoundation90 min estimateArtifact: Generalization contract audit

  2. 02

    Split Data by Causality, Not Convenience

    Live

    Use information availability, time, entity, group, and provenance to construct honest evaluation partitions.

    Failure labIntermediate105 min estimateArtifact: Causal split validator

  3. 03

    Linear Models as Debugging Instruments

    Live

    Use transparent linear baselines to expose target, feature, split, scale, and slice failures before adding complexity.

    Build labIntermediate110 min estimateArtifact: Linear baseline diagnostic

  4. 04

    Trees, Boosting, and the Shape of Residual Error

    Live

    Understand how tree ensembles partition mistakes and when their inductive bias wins.

    Build labIntermediate110 min estimateArtifact: Residual partition audit

  5. 05

    Calibration, Thresholds, and Decision Cost

    Live

    Turn scores into actions using reliability curves and asymmetric error costs.

    Systems labIntermediate100 min estimateArtifact: Calibrated threshold policy

  6. 06

    When the Product Needs Ranking, Not Classification

    Live

    Choose ranking losses and metrics when ordering quality matters more than labels.

    Concept labIntermediate90 min estimateArtifact: Ranking evaluation contract

  7. 07

    Drift, Feedback Loops, and Delayed Labels

    Live

    Design monitoring when the system changes the data it later learns from.

    Systems labAdvanced110 min estimateArtifact: Drift feedback monitor