The field of Machine Learning develops and provides methods for the analysis of data and signals. Typical application domains are computer hearing, computer vision, general pattern recognition and large-scale data analysis (recently often termed "Big Data"). Furthermore, Machine Learning methods serve as models for information processing and learning in humans and animals, and are often considered as part of artificial intelligence approaches.

This course gives an introduction to unsupervised learning methods, i.e., methods that extract knowledge from data without the requirement of explicit knowledge about individual data points. We will introduce a common probabilistic framework for learning and a methodology to derive learning algorithms for different types of tasks. Examples that are derived are algorithms for clustering, classification, component extraction, feature learning, blind source separation and dimensionality reduction. Relations to neural network models and learning in biological systems will be discussed where appropriate.