| Instructor: |
Marina Meila Padelford B-321, Box 354322 543-8484 (in Padelford) mmp@{cs.washington.edu,stat.washington.edu} |
| Office hours: | Instructor: TBA, TA: |
| TA: | Sam Tay NetId: tays |
| Lecture place and time: | Tue, Thu 3:30 - 5:20 on-line
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| Course home page: | http://www.stat.washington.edu/courses/stat391/spring20.
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| Class mailing list: | stat391a_sp20 |
| Textbooks: |
Extensive course notes are available for download.
Other recommended books are listed on the books web page.
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| Format: | The course will
consist of two weekly 2 hour lectures and weekly homework
assignments. For the first time this year, occasionally, the 4th lecture hour on Thursday will be devoted to special topics, on which you will not be tested (except possibly for extra credit). Lectures will be on Zoom. The link for each lecture will be sent by email and/or posted on Canvas. Lectures will be recorded. This class has been always taught on the whiteboard, hence there are no slides readily available, and, at least for the beginning, it will be taught on a virtual whiteboard, with GoodNotes. But one of the great benefits of teaching trough an electronic medium is using mixed media, so it's very likely for slides to start appearing. |
| Participation: | Attendance is not mandatory. However, class participation is important and therefore it will be part of your grade. By class participation I mean more than just being in class; you're expected to actively participate, either by asking questions (the easiest) or by answering my questions or my invitations to comments. We will explore how to do this in the most natural way for the on-line setting, by e.g. raising hands in Zoom, chat, or voice. Suggestions are welcome (and we will ask for them in the next poll)! |
| Assignments: | Typically
assignments will be posted on the web (usually) on
Tuesdays and will be due before class (usually) the following Tuesday. The
homeworks will consist of problems and short programming assignments.
It is important to turn in your homework timely. First, because
homework is a component of learning the new material. New lectures
will build on past lectures as well as past homework results. Second,
fair grading requires fair conditions for everybody. You are
allowed to be late with your homework twice with no penalty.
Further late homework will be penalized by up to 50%. No late
homeworks are accepted once the solutions are out or the graded
homework returned (this happens typically one week after the homework
due date).
Programming assignments:A typical programming assignment is: generate some data from a given distribution, do some processing, plot the results, draw conclusions. You will have to implement the data generation and processing. The programming language is your choice, and you are free (and encouraged!) to use library functions, but you have to write the code for the algorithms that are the subject of the course. For example, you are not expected to implement your own random number generator, but you will have to write code (that will use the random numbers) to simulate a dice roll. You will implement the formula for mean and standard deviation even if the software you are using has a built-in function for that. Occasionally, you may be required to submit the code you used for the programming assignments. This should not be in the same file with the homework, but submitted separately. We will not grade or debug your code, but we will do random checks to see if the code indeed does what it's supposed to do.
Python and Matlab. We will offer some support for those of you who want to learn one of these languages while taking 391. The TA will offer a pyton tutorial, and a short intro to Matlab will be posted. Matlab is very easy to learn on your own, and is awesome at making plots. Python is very popular overall, and also very easy to learn. Making plots is comparatively less easy, but the package matplotlib (which emulates the Matlab plotting capabilities) is a great help. The virtual classroom environment we will make available will have both Matlab and python installed for you. We will have to confirm that the virtual classroom is available this quarter. Making plots. Often, the result of your programming assignment will be displayed as a plot. You are allowed to use any programming environment for making the plots. But, since in the past students experienced some difficulties with this, here are some suggestions. (1) Matlab is very easy to use for making plots, and has some nice functionality for special plots like histograms. (In addition, matlab is available on the CS clusters and on many other machines in CS -- not sure this is true any longer.) (2) python (matplotlib) is almost as nice as matlab (3) In past years, many students who didn't use Matlab used Excel. I noticed from their homeworks that, towards the end of the class, they were having more difficulty than the Matlab/python users in getting their plots to look good (and had more frustaration with the homework). (4) There are other programs around, like R, Splus, LaTeX, ... Other homework problems will require calculus and easy arithmetic (in addition to what you learn in this class, of course). Both literal and numeric answers should be brought to their simplest form for full credit, and to allow you to fully appreciate the result. Math topics you should review: set theory, combinatorics and counting, taking derivatives and their meaning , integration (integration by parts, elementary properties of integration, primitives of common functions), elementary multivariate calculus and matrix operations. If there is need, tutorial sessions can be arranged for any of these topics.
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| Teamwork: | Students are encouraged to talk to each other, to the TA, to the instructors, or to anyone else about any of the assignments. Any assistance, though, must be limited to discussion of the problem and sketching general approaches to a solution. Each student must write out his or her own solutions to the homework, including the code. |
| Grading: | (Before) (Approximately) 60-70% assignments, 25-30% final exam and 5-10% class participation. In recent years, there was also a project. If there is one, it will take part of the homework weight. What is more likely is to have 1-2 miniprojects disguised as homeworks. In the last year, we had a few in-class quizzes; if this happens, the homework will be re-weighted to include the quizzes. The final exam will be an (almost) closed book exam. If having proctored exams in on-line settings is not possible then I will consider alternatives such as no final/optional final/project instead of final. There are many unknowns at this time about what interactions are permitted by the software we will be using. |
| Prerequisites: | A class in multivariate calculus (partial derivatives, multiple integrals, matrix algebra). A class in probability, including conditional probability and independence. Ability to write simple programs in order to do the homework. Ability to reason mathematically, to read, understand and discover proofs. Here is a list of the calculus topics we typically use. |