Syllabus

Prerequisites

You are expected to have programming experience at the level of CS 50 or above, and statistics knowledge at the level of Stat 100 or above (Stat 110 recommended). HW0 is designed to test your knowledge on the prerequisites. Successful completion of this assignment will show that this course is suitable for you. HW0 will not be graded but you are required to submit to enroll in the class.

Software

Course Activities

The course is structured in three different types of activities that repeat themselves each week and they are: Lectures, Labs, and Sections.

1. Lectures are held on Mon and Wed from 1:30-2:45 pm in Northwest Building, Lecture Hall B-103. Attendance is mandatory for FAS students and for DCE students recorded lectures will be available and must be visioned within 2 days after the lectures. There will be quizzes at the end of each lecture to assess the understanding of the material that will help us identify gaps. Lectures will be recorded and made available real time for DCE students and 24 hours later for in-campus students via Canvas.

2. Labs are held on Thur 4:30-6:00 pm and Fri 10:30-11:45 am in Pierce 301. The two labs have identical contents and you should plan to attend one of the two. Attendance is optional, however it is strongly encouraged. Labs are designed as hands-on activities and are useful to practice with problems similar to the homework. Labs will be videotaped only for distant students.

3. Sections are supplementary activities led by teaching fellows to elaborate upon the lectures material. There are two types of sections:

   • 3a. Standard Sections are held on Monday and will cover a blend of lecture material and practice problems.
   • 3b. Advanced Sections are held on Wednesday and will cover advanced topics about mathematical underpinnings of the methods presented in lecture and lab. The Advanced Section material is required for AC209A students.

Recommended Textbook

An Introduction to Statistical Learning by James, Witten, Hastie, Tibshirani.

The book is available here:

Assignments

The final grade will be calculated using the following weights for each assignment:

Homework

There are 9 homework to complete. There will be an initial self-assessment homework called HW0 and 8 more graded homework assignments. Some of them will be due in a week and some of them in two weeks. You have the option to work and submit the homework in pairs for all the assignments except two which you will do individually. You will be working in Jupyter Notebooks which you can run in your own environment or in the SEAS JupyterHub cloud. The homework are graded on a scale 1 to 5, where 5 is the highest grade.

Quizzes

There will be a quiz at the end of the class based on what was discussed in lecture. Students will have a limited amount of time to complete the quiz (DCE students will have 72 hours). 40% of the quizzes will be dropped before calculating your final grade.

Final Project

There will be a final group project (2-4 students) due during Exams period encompassing all the material learned in class.

Submitting an Assignment

Instructions for turning in assignments will be posted when the semester starts.

Grading Guidelines

Homework will be graded based on:

1. How correct your code is and whether the cells in your notebook run (we are not troubleshooting code).
2. How you have interpreted the results (we want text not just code).
3. How well you present the results (as you would do in a report).

Getting Help

For questions about homework, course content, package installation, and after you have tried to troubleshoot yourselves, the process to get help is:

1. Post the question in Piazza and hopefully your peers will answer. Note that in Piazza questions are visible to everyone. The TFs monitor the posts.
2. Go to Office Hours, this is the best way to get help.
3. For private matters send an email to the Helpline: cs109a2018@gmail.com. The Helpline is monitored by TFs.
4. For personal and confidential matters send an email to the instructors.

Course Policies

Collaboration Policy