Developing Interactive Exercise Materials for Machine Learning Using Spreadsheets

This paper presents a new technique for creating machine-learning exercise materials using spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are often used in teaching machine learning for beginners and non-specialists. However, computation in machine learning models is divided into a learning phase and an inference phase, and conventional spreadsheet-based materials either rely on the software's extensions for the learning phase or can result in huge sheets, which is unsuitable for learners who want to observe it. We realize the learning phase on a spreadsheet that fits within a PC screen, including visualization for better understanding, without using any extensions. Also, this implementation technique makes it possible to execute or pause the learning process interactively. We will show an example of a neural network implementation and discuss the merits and limitations of this technique.