Welcome
Welcome to my STAT 789 web site, for the Summer of 2005, and to the course.
Since my
original announcement for the course, I decided to make a few changes.
In order to increase enrollment (so that the class would not be cancelled), I lowered the prerequisites.
I still plan to cover the advanced material that I originally planned to cover, but I will now do so assuming less
prior knowledge, and I will not hold students responsible for mastering the material to the degree that I originally
had in mind. Also, I've changed the way in which students will be graded, by eliminating the short quizzes that I
had planned to give, and changing the weights for the various components of the grading scheme. All of these
changes are reflected in the
syllabus, which you should take time to carefully read. (Note: Since this is
the first time that I've taught a course on this material, the schedule showing the material to be covered each
lecture is extremely tentative.)
Please get into the habit of checking this web site regularly.
(By going to the
Announcements page you can keep
track of what I add and what changes I make throughout the web site.)
It would be good if you read the material in Ch. 1 and Ch. 2 of the book by Hastie, Tibshirani, and Friedman (which I
will denote by HTF throughout my course materials)
prior to the first lecture. Also, try to download the free Weka and R software. (See the bottom of
the
home page for this course for instructions.)
I will give you instructions for obtaining free copies of the four Salford Systems software packages that we will use
later --- don't do anything pertaining to downloading the Salford Systems software until I give you instructions!