3 credits
Spring 2025 Lecture Upper DivisionThis introductory course covers the fundamentals of computing for statistics and data analysis. It starts with a brief overview of programming using a general purpose compiled language (C) and a statistics-oriented interpreted language (R). The course proceeds to cover data structures and algorithms that are directly relevant to statistics and data analysis and concludes with a computing-oriented introduction to selected statistical methods. A significant part of the course involves programming and hands-on experimentation demonstrating the covered techniques, ration, and Markov chain Monte Carlo methods.
Learning Outcomes1Given a straightforward data manipulation problem, decide on what elementary data structures to use, write down an algorithm for a solution as a pseudocode, and analyze its computational complexity.
2Implement an algorithm using C and/or R code, understand, modify, and if needed perform basic debugging of the existing code.
3Understand and implement the computational techniques of numerical optimization, matrix manipulation, sampling, logistic regression, and EM algorithm.