Fall, 2009      STA 705 - 001 Advanced Computational Inference

Instructor: Dr. Mai Zhou
Office: P. O. T. 849, Mailbox: P. O. T. 843, Phone: 257-6912, E-mail: mai@ms.uky.edu, Web page (this page): http://www.ms.uky.edu/~mai/sta705.html
Office Hours: TBA or by appointment.

Class: MWF 12:00 PM -- 12:50 PM at CB 309.  Final exam time Dec. 18, 10:30am

Prereq: STA 601. STA 624  

Course description:
Numerical Optimization, Stochastic Optimization. EM Algorithm. Resampling Methods. 
Techniques in generating pseudo random numbers, Markov Chain Monte Carlo Methods. Simulations.
The language of choice is R. Download a copy of R onto your own computer. Making of R package.
 
Reference books: (No one book fits all our needs. I will draw materials from several books)
Numerical Optimization  by Nocedal and Wright. Springer 1999. (for Newton method etc)
An Introduction to the Bootstrap  by Efron and Tibshirani. Chapman Hall/CRC 1993.  (for bootstrap)
Bootstrap Methods and their Applications  by Davison and Hinkley. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997.
(more theoretical) The bootstrap and Edgeworth Expansion  by P. Hall. Springer 1992.
Monte Carlo Strategies in Scientific Computing   by J. Liu (2001) (for mcmc)
An Introduction to R (this is included in the R download.)

Useful Lecture Notes  From Others:

Simple example
el.test.3.R
el.test.simple
Notes from Iowa State U
A Chapter on Numerical Maximization
A book chapter on Matroplis Algorithm: Free download
Example of EM

Computing: The ability to program software code and run them on computer is essential to this course.
Some examples of statistical/mathematical packages useful are: R/Splus, SAS, MatLab, LimDep, Gauss, Ox etc. We mainly use R in this course.

Grading: Homework 35%; Two Projects 25%;  Midterm 20%; Final 20%.

Tentative Topics/timeline
Homeworks.
References: Focus on equation (1), and ignor the w(r) and delta for the time being. Smoothed Rank Regression.

Example of SQP
R function for one iteration of nonparametric EM regression

Example of bootstrap regression, 1 2 and 3
Some tips about efficient R programming
Typesetting with Latex: including graph in the LaTeX and output PDF
University of Kentucky LaTeX Dissertation templatePh.D. Dissertation
Example of calling C from R:  Example
Example of making an R package: Example


Central Limit Theorem ---> Edgeworth Expansion (Berry-Essen bound) ---> Bartlett Correction
---> Bootstrap Approximation.       For mean,  for censored data Hazard. for empirical likelihood ratio.