{"id":395,"date":"2018-12-24T16:43:39","date_gmt":"2018-12-25T00:43:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/organizingchaos\/?p=395"},"modified":"2018-12-24T16:45:14","modified_gmt":"2018-12-25T00:45:14","slug":"course-review-stat-406","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/organizingchaos\/2018\/12\/24\/course-review-stat-406\/","title":{"rendered":"Course Review: STAT 406"},"content":{"rendered":"

Methods for Statistical Learning
\n<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

“To fix ideas…”<\/em><\/p>\n

Text:\u00a0<\/strong>An Introduction to Statistical Learning by\u00a0James, G., Witten, D., Hastie, T. and Tibshirani, R.<\/p>\n

Prof:<\/strong>\u00a0 Dr.\u00a0Mat\u00edas Salibi\u00e1n-Barrera<\/p>\n

Mat\u00edas is a very earnest professor who often works through helpful examples in class.\u00a0He also provides supplementary class notes that are useful to review in your own time. His slides can be a bit confusing from time to time but are generally understandable.<\/p>\n

\n

Difficulty<\/b><\/p>\n

This was my first statistics course. I found the material quite challenging at first because I was unfamiliar with a lot of the vocabulary and notation that was used. Also, we used a lot of quite novel results from advanced linear algebra and probability. However, I soon got used to the notation and realized that to succeed in the course one does not need to fully understand what mathematics operating in the background (just need to understand a little). The first midterm was short,\u00a0free response and had a low average. The subsequent midterms and the final were multiple choice, largely, and were easier, the only difficulty often being the wording of some of the options. A lot of the material was also reviewed\u00a0from CPSC 340. One of the aspects of the course that was a bit annoying was the webwork. They had a time limit and would often start by accident, or give you an incorrect mark on your first attempt. The labs were pretty reasonable, though you need to be quite quick and compare answers with your friends.<\/p>\n

Key Concepts<\/strong><\/p>\n

Model Selection, esp Cross-Validation<\/p>\n

Elastic Net Methods<\/p>\n

Tree-based methods<\/p>\n

Splines<\/p>\n

Bagging and Boosting<\/p>\n

Clustering Techniques<\/p>\n

PCA<\/p>\n

Hard Concepts<\/strong><\/p>\n

AIC Derivation: Can be pretty confusing as each formula\u00a0makes different assumptions<\/p>\n

Cross-Validation as Expectation: Make sure one understands the notation for expectation used<\/p>\n

Linear Predictor: Some models may be linear predictors though they do not appear all that linear<\/p>\n

Conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n

A handy\u00a0<\/span>review of CPSC 340 except in R. Would have liked to have delved more into the statistics of it and how one chooses an appropriate model for a given data set.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Methods for Statistical Learning “To fix ideas…” Text:\u00a0An Introduction to Statistical Learning by\u00a0James, G., Witten, D., Hastie, T. and Tibshirani, R. Prof:\u00a0 Dr.\u00a0Mat\u00edas Salibi\u00e1n-Barrera Mat\u00edas is a very earnest professor who often works through helpful examples in class.\u00a0He also provides supplementary class notes that are useful to review in your own time. His slides can […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28516,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[281864],"tags":[3957447,3957448,3957449,115501,37],"class_list":["post-395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-course-reviews","tag-matias","tag-stat-406","tag-stat406","tag-statistical-learning","tag-ubc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/organizingchaos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/organizingchaos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/organizingchaos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/organizingchaos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28516"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/organizingchaos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=395"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/organizingchaos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":398,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/organizingchaos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395\/revisions\/398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/organizingchaos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/organizingchaos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/organizingchaos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}