At this point, the priority is to complete exercises implementing and using the neural network.
If you have time, the following exercises can give practice on the techniques from today's lecture. They require a certain level of independence and may be challenging.
Consider your own neural network and one of the datasets (iris or breast cancer). Try to remove features from the data set and see if it improves features. Which features can be removed with no penalty? Can any be removed for benefit?
Although Marsland presents LDA in the context of dimensionality reduction, that is not the original purpose of LDA. The lecture focused on the Fisher Linear Discriminant (FLD) which is LDA as a classifier.
Implement FLD on one of the two datasets we have worked on (breast cancer or iris). Note that the formulæ are simple and based on fundamental functions of statistics. If you have any experience using spreadsheets, it should be straight-forward to implement FLD in such software. Of course, you may implement FLD in Haskell if you prefer. You may also use Marsland's python code.