Announcements

New! (Not actually new but moved back to the top). The final exam will not be in the usual classroom. It will be in Molecular and Cellular Biology 3-120. MCB is the building across Washington Ave. that has the statue of a molecule out front. The classroom is right inside the front door.

New! Solutions to homework assignments 9 through 12 posted. (Follow the Homework Solutions link in the navigation to the left. The user name and password are the same as last semester and the same as were announced the first day of class. All homework solutions for the whole course are now posted.

New! Office hours for Geyer during exam week will be 2:30–3:20 every weekday (Monday, May 7, through Friday, May 11, the final exam being 8:00 Saturday, May 12).

Changes noted in class made to some computer examples web pages. On the Poisson Regression web page in the Confidence Intervals section the confidence intervals now correctly use the variable conf.level set at the top of the Rweb form. On the Bernoulli GLM, Other Link Functions web page a link to the on-line help for the R function binomial that specifies link functions for the binomial family has been added.

Required statement about mental health and stress management added to general info page.

Second midterm grades are now in Moodle (link in the navigation area at left).

Solutions and grade distributions to the second midterm posted. They are under the Exam Solutions link in the navigation to the left.

A new section (11.3) has been added to the handout on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC).

Slides 100–101 of deck 4 and the computer example that goes with them have been simplified.

Material covered on the second midterm starts on slide 147 of deck 2 (beginning of hypothesis tests) and goes through through slide 45 of deck 4 (end of improper priors) and homeworks 5–8. This midterm is not cumulative. It doesn't specifically test material covered on the first midterm (although that material does underly the material we do cover). Note: the final exam is cumulative, so don't forget all the first midterm material.

First midterm grades are now in Moodle.

Office hours for Yang were changed from Monday to Tuesday. Now listed correctly on the course info web page.

Solutions and grade distributions to the first midterm posted. They are under the Exam Solutions link in the navigation to the left.

The Moodle web site (which has the gradebook) should now work for all students.

The first midterm covers the material on the first four homeworks, all of the slides in deck 1 and slides 1–146 in deck 2.

All three sections should now have permission to view the recorded lectures. Anyone who doesn't have permission needs to have their name added individually because their name wasn't on the class list used by UMConnect (which can be incorrect, I don't know why). See the instructor to get permission if you don't have it already.

A student asked me about the R function mad (on-line help). Why doesn't it calculate the same median absolute deviation from the median he calculated by hand? It turns out that the mad function doesn't actually calculate the MAD of the empirical distribution but a constant times the MAD of the empirical distribution, the default value for this constant being 1.4826, for some reason that isn't really explained in the on-line help. But setting the constant equal to one does calculate the MAD of the empirical distribution, that is, if the data are in the R vector x, then 

    mad(x, constant = 1)

does calculate the MAD of the empirical distribution for these data.

For those who were not in this section last semester, there will be a review session on Tuesday, January 24 at 2:30–3:20 in Akerman Hall 225. (this previously say January 26 but that was wrong).

For those who can't attend at that hour, here is a link to the material covered in the review session.

Exam Dates

Exam Date and Time
First Midterm Wednesday, February 22
Second Midterm Wednesday, April 4
Final Exam 8:00am–10:00am Saturday, May 12

The final exam time is set by the U.

The final exam is in Molecular and Cellular Biology 3-120.