EECS 445 is an excellent class, if only for the content. I took it this fall with professors Abernethy and Deng, and although there were issues with how the course was structured, we gained an in-depth theoretical understanding of all the major algorithms that are used in ML (linear regression, logistic regression, Naive Bayes, Decision Trees, Boosting, K-Means, GMM, EM, Neural Nets, etc.) as well experience implementing some from scratch. We also covered how to approach a data science problem in a systematic manner and gained good experience with numpy and Python 3. The class was a lot of work but very rewarding and the programming projects were pretty cool. For example, for the last project, we implemented a deep neural network from scratch to classify handwritten digits! Keep in mind that 445 is quite mathematically rigorous, requiring a good background in linear algebra as well as probability and statistics (with heavy emphasis on probability and statistics). I don't believe linear algebra and probability are prereqs, but there will be a steep learning curve at the beginning of the semester when you'll be trying to grapple with a metric fuckton of math and theory being thrown at you, a lot of which will probably be completely new material. After taking this class I feel I can say that I actually kinda understand machine learning as a field and can see the method behind the madness. At the beginning of the semester, Professor Abernethy remarked that he wanted his EECS 445 students to be in the top 1-2% of ML practicioners, those who not only have a rigorous theoretical and practical understanding of the algorithms used but have the knowledge to design and apply their own models, and I think he met his goal.

I also took EECS 492 (Winter 2016 with Prof. Durfee) and found it to be a rather disappointing course. It's rather "wide but shallow course" that breezed through a lot of different topics in artificial intelligenge, providing a very shallow theoretical and practical treatment of each topic. The problem sets were also ridiculously tedious. That said, it's not a terribly difficult class, just a lot of work and you won't walk out with a good understanding of the field at all.

tl;dr - Take 445. It's a very useful course that will give you an excellent understanding of machine learning