Announcement of C. Sutton's Summer Course for 2006

STAT 789

Advanced Topics in Statistics: Bootstrapping and Other Resampling Methods

Time
The class will meet 7:20-10:00 PM on Tuesdays and Thursdays, starting June 6 and ending with the final exam on July 27. Because I do not wish to deal with Incompletes, it is important that students will be able to complete the work for the course within the official time period.
Prerequisite
Permission of instructor, but essentially STAT 554.
Description
This course will cover most of the material in the book An Introduction to the Bootstrap, by Efron and Tibshirani. The main focus will be on bootstrapping, but related methods like jackkniffing and cross-validation will also be covered. (Bootstrapping is a computer-intensive nonparametric technique for making statistical inferences, like estimating the standard error and bias of point estimators, obtaining confidence intervals for distribution measures (such as the mean), doing tests of hypotheses, and estimating measures of prediction error.) The software emphasized will be R (which can be downloaded for free).
Grading
I may tweak this slightly prior to the start of the class, but currently I plan to use the following grading scheme: (Note: While some homework problems can be discussed with others, other homework exercises should be done entirely on your own (except for any hints which I give to the class).)
Important Note: My guess is that the course will be cancelled unless the enrollment reaches about 15. So if you really want to take this course (and earn 3 credits), you should register by about May 19, since I will request that a decision be made about whether or not the class will be canceled about two weeks prior to the scheduled starting date.