Odum Institute: An Introduction to Statistical Machine Learning Using R - Day 2

This two-day (3/22/2022 and 3/24/2022) course will be offered via Zoom. Attendance is required as the course will not be recorded.

Course Summary:
Statistical machine learning and data mining is an interdisciplinary research area which is closely related to statistics, computer sciences, engineering, and bioinformatics. Many statistical machine learning and data mining techniques and algorithms are very useful for various scientific areas. This short course will provide an overview of statistical machine learning and data mining techniques with applications to the analysis of real data. Supervised learning techniques will be covered, including penalized regression such as LASSO and its variants, support vector machines. The main emphasis will be on the analysis of real data sets from various scientific fields. The techniques discussed will be demonstrated in R.

This course is intended for researchers who have some knowledge of statistics and want to be introduced to statistical machine learning and data mining, or practitioners who would like to apply statistical machine learning techniques to their problems.

Outline (R exercises will be included):
• Fundamentals of Statistical Learning
• Training versus Test error rates
• Supervised versus Unsupervised Methods
• Bias/Variance tradeoff
• Linear regression and penalized regression
• Ridge Regression
• Lasso
• Further Extensions (if time permits)
• Cross-validation
• Classification techniques
• Logistic regression and penalized logistic regression
• Nearest Neighbors Classification
• Support Vector Machines

Prerequisite:
Participants should be familiar with linear regression and basic statistical and probability concepts, as well as some familiarity with R programming.

Instructor: Yufeng Liu
Yufeng Liu is currently a professor in the Department of Statistics and Operations Research, Department of Biostatistics, and Department of Genetics at UNC-Chapel Hill. His current research interests include statistical machine learning, high dimensional data analysis, personalized medicine, and bioinformatics. He has taught statistical machine learning courses multiple times at UNC, as well as short courses on this subject at Joint Statistical Meetings, ENAR, FDA, and Biostatistics Summer Institutes at the University of Washington.

Dr. Liu received the CAREER Award from National Science Foundation in 2008, and Ruth and Phillip Hettleman Prize for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement in 2010, and the inaugural Leo Breiman Junior Award in 2017. He is currently an elected fellow at American Statistical Association, Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS), and an elected member of International Statistical Institute.

Registration Fees
- UNC-CH Students: $0, with a $20 deposit to hold your spot (deposit is refundable upon your attendance for at least 66% of the course)
- UNC-CH Faculty/Staff/Postdoc: $40
- Non UNC-CH: $40