Data Analysis for the Natural Sciences II: Machine Learning

Catalog description

This is a course on data analysis and statistical inference for the natural sciences focused on machine learning techniques. The main topics are: Review of modern statistics, including probability distribution functions and their moments, conditional distributions and Bayes' theorem, parameter estimation, Markov chains; Fundamentals of machine learning, including training/validation samples, cross-validation, supervised vs. unsupervised learning, regularization and resampling methods, tree-based methods, support vector machines, neural networks, deep learning and image analysis with convolutional neural networks. Students will obtain both the theoretical background in data analysis and get hands-on experience analyzing real scientific data. This course forms a two-course sequence with PHYS 3358 . Students must also have prior programming experience in python.