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Data Science

Lecture notes

Abridged notes as printed — examinable material only
Extended notes with extra material on non-examinable material such as neural networks

If you spot a mistake in the printed notes, let me know.

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Moodle

Lecture schedule

This is the planned lecture schedule. It will be updated as and when actual lectures deviate from schedule. Material marked * is non-examinable. Slides are uploaded the night before a lecture, and re-uploaded after the lecture with annotations made during the lecture.

Pre-recorded versions of each lecture are available on last year's version of this page.

Prerequisites
	Example sheet 0 and solutions
§1–§4. Learning with probability models
Lecture 1 [slides]	1. Learning with probability models 1.1 Specifying probability models
Lecture 2 [slides]	1.2 Standard random variables 1.3 Maximum likelihood estimation 1.4 Numerical optimization
Lecture 3 [slides]	1.5 Likelihood notation 1.6 Generative models 1.7 Supervised learning 3.1, 3.2 Prediction accuracy versus probability modelling (* non-examinable)
Lecture 4 [slides]	Mock exam question and walkthrough 3.3 Neural networks (* non-examinable)
Lecture 5 [slides]	2.1 Linear modelling 2.2 Feature design 2.3 Diagnosing a linear model
Lecture 6 [slides]	2.5 The geometry of linear models 2.6 Interpreting parameters
Lecture 7 [slides]	2.4 Probabilistic linear modelling
	Example sheet 1 Example sheet OPTIONAL ex1 practical exercises [ex1.ipynb] (for supervisions) OPTIONAL PyTorch introduction and challenge OPTIONAL climate dataset challenge climate.ipynb Code snippets: fitting.ipynb, lm.ipynb Datasets investigated: climate.ipynb, stop-and-search.ipynb
§5, §6, §8. Bayesian inference and Monte Carlo
Lecture 8 [slides]	5.1 Bayes's rule for random variables 5.2 Bayes's rule calculations
Lecture 9 [slides]	5.2 Bayes's rule calculations (continued) 6.1 Monte Carlo integration 4.1 Measuring model fit (* non-examinable)
Lecture 10 [slides]	6.2 Bayes's rule via computation 8.3 Finding the posterior
Lecture 11 [slides]	8.1, 8.2 Bayesianism 8.4 Bayesian readouts
video only	Mock exam question 2 and walkthrough
	Example sheet 2 OPTIONAL ex2 practical exercises [ex2.ipynb] (for supervisions) OPTIONAL Climate confidence challenge
§7, §9, §10. Frequentist methods: hypothesis testing and empirical evaluation
Lecture 11 ctd	5.3 Deriving the likelihood
Lecture 12 [slides]	7.1–7.2 Empirical cdf 7.3 The empirical distribution 9. Frequentism 9.1, 9.2 Resampling / confidence intervals 9.6 Non-parametric resampling
Lecture 13 [slides]	9.3 Hypothesis testing
Lecture 14 [slides]	9.3 Hypothesis testing (continued) 10. Holdout evaluation and the challenge of induction (* non-examinable) 12.2–3 Sequence models with history: RNNs and Transformers
video only	Mock exam question 3 and walkthrough
	Example sheet 3 OPTIONAL ex3 practical exercises [ex3.ipynb] (for supervisions) OPTIONAL Climate confidence challenge
§11+§12. Markov chains and other sequence models
Lecture 15 [slides]	12.1 Learning a Markov chain 11, 11.1 Markov chain models 11.2–3 Calculations with Markov chains
Lecture 16 [slides]	Markov chain behaviour 11.4 Stationarity, 11.5* Average behaviour
video only	Mock exam question 4 and walkthrough
	Example sheet 4 OPTIONAL ex4 practical exercises [ex4.ipynb] (for supervisions) OPTIONAL Stoat-finding challenge and Moodle submission