She is a professor of Cognitive Science, but UC San Diego associate professor Angela Yu is inviting Computer Science and Computer Engineering students to take one of her courses on statistical data analysis. She will teach an undergraduate course (COGS 118D: Mathematical Statistics for Behavioral Data Analysis), and a graduate course (COGS 243: Statistical Inference and Data Analysis), both during the Winter 2017 quarter.
Talking about the graduate course, Yu (at left) notes that "the course profides a rigorous treatment of hypothesis testing, statistical inference, model fitting, and exploratory data analysis techniques used in the cognitive and neural sciences." Both frequentist and Bayesian techniques will be covered, and Yu says that students "will acquire an understanding of mathematical foundations and hands-on experience in applying these methods using Matlab." The undergraduate course explores statistical methods for analyzing behavioral data. Students are expected to use both classical and Bayesian statistical methods for estimation, hypothesis testing, regression and model comparison. Emphasis will be evenly distributed between mathematical understanding of statistical methods, and common applications.
The courses are also applications-oriented, but students should have sufficient mathematical understanding to enable sound choice of statistical methods in different situations. Indeed, only students who are comfortable with calculus, linear algebra and elementary probability should enroll. Although the winter quarter doesn't launch until January, Yu has already set up preliminary course websites. Although the subject matter of both courses is connected, the graduate and undergrad classes meet separately and have different formats.
Yu did dual B.S. degrees in computer science and theoretical mathematics at MIT, then got her Ph.D. in computational neuroscience from University College London in the UK. She joined the UC San Diego faculty in 2014.
Thinking about enrolling in one of these courses? Contact Prof. Yu at ajyu@ucsd.edu, and check out the relevant course website below: