ST421      Half Unit
Developments in Statistical Methods

This information is for the 2013/14 session.

Teacher responsible

Dr Wicher Bergsma COL 6.06

Availability

This course is available on the MSc in Econometrics and Mathematical Economics, MSc in Statistics, MSc in Statistics (Financial Statistics), MSc in Statistics (Financial Statistics) (Research) and MSc in Statistics (Research). This course is not available as an outside option.

Pre-requisites

Students must have completed Statistical Inference: Principles, Methods and Computation (ST425).

It is also useful to take ST411: Regression, Diagnostics and Generalised Linear Modelling in parallel to this course.

Course content

Our aim is to teach students important statistical methodologies that reflect the exciting development of the subject over the last ten years, which include empirical likelihood, MCMC, bootstrap, local likelihood and local fitting, model Assessment and selection methods, boosting, support vector machines. These are computationally intensive techniques that are particularly powerful in analysing large-scale data sets with complex structure. A selection from the following topics. Robustness of likelihood approaches: distance between working model and "truth", maximum likelihood under wrong models, quasi-MLE, model selection with AIC, robust estimation. Empirical likelihood: empirical likelihood of mean. Bayesian methods and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) basic Bayes, Gibbs sampler, Metropolis-Hastings algorithm. Elements of statistical learning: global fitting versus local fitting, linear methods for regression, splines, kernel methods and local likelihood. Model assessment and selection: bias-variance trade-off, effective number of parameters, BIC, cross-validation. Further topics: additive models, varying-coefficient linear models, boosting, neural network, support vector machines. The course will be continuously updated to reflect important new developments in statistics.

Teaching

20 hours of lectures and 10 hours of seminars in the LT.

Indicative reading

T Hastie, R Tibshirani & J Friedman, The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference and Prediction; Y Pawitan, In All Likelihood: Statistical Modelling and Inference Using Likelihood; M A Tanner, Tools for Statistical Inference.

Assessment

Exam (100%, duration: 2 hours) in the main exam period.

Key facts

Department: Statistics

Total students 2012/13: 27

Average class size 2012/13: 28

Value: Half Unit

Guidelines for interpreting course guide information

Personal development skills

  • Application of numeracy skills