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 A withdrawn unit is retained only at its previously advertised URL and is not presented as live.
- 01
The Generalization Contract
LiveDefine the population, decision, loss, and evidence under which performance is expected to transfer.
Concept labFoundation90 min estimateArtifact: Generalization contract audit
- 02
Split Data by Causality, Not Convenience
LiveUse information availability, time, entity, group, and provenance to construct honest evaluation partitions.
Failure labIntermediate105 min estimateArtifact: Causal split validator
- 03
Linear Models as Debugging Instruments
LiveUse transparent linear baselines to expose target, feature, split, scale, and slice failures before adding complexity.
Build labIntermediate110 min estimateArtifact: Linear baseline diagnostic
- 04
Trees, Boosting, and the Shape of Residual Error
LiveUnderstand how tree ensembles partition mistakes and when their inductive bias wins.
Build labIntermediate110 min estimateArtifact: Residual partition audit
- 05
Calibration, Thresholds, and Decision Cost
LiveTurn scores into actions using reliability curves and asymmetric error costs.
Systems labIntermediate100 min estimateArtifact: Calibrated threshold policy
- 06
When the Product Needs Ranking, Not Classification
LiveChoose ranking losses and metrics when ordering quality matters more than labels.
Concept labIntermediate90 min estimateArtifact: Ranking evaluation contract
- 07
Drift, Feedback Loops, and Delayed Labels
LiveDesign monitoring when the system changes the data it later learns from.
Systems labAdvanced110 min estimateArtifact: Drift feedback monitor