I’ve finished a handful of assignments and projects during Spring Semester 2023 at Rutgers New Brunswick. The most exciting of which was a group project in my Statistical Learning class which took an input of lyrics and discerned the genre from which it came by analyzing key words using NLP. You can find it here.
Statistical Learning, Regression Methods and Statistical Learning were the highlights of my semester. I also took Creative Writing and Real Analysis.
Statistical-Learning Repository
Statistical Learning was my favorite as it was a sample platter for methods of dissecting and working with data. It covered bootstrapping, model selection using Leaps and Lars, methods of exploring high dimensional data, support vector machines, smoothing, neural nets, natural language processing, false discovery rates, survival analysis, stochastic processes, chaos theory…etc. To piggyback off of chaos theory, I’m doing an independent study next semester with Professor LuValle helping him continue build his average rainfall prediction model. I have my doubts about the premise that you can predict average rainfall for a specific area a year ahead of time at a rate higher than random chance. I also don’t know much about the topic. I should learn a lot from the project, and am excited to work alongside Professor LuValle. He comes from a somewhat famous family, as his father is James LuValle, who participated in the famous 1936 Olympics alongside Jesse Owens. Above is the repository where I stored all the projects and write-ups for this class.
Regression Methods was my second favorite class. It also had an application-first approach. I showed up to class at most one-fifth of the time and finished with an A. Simple linear, multiple linear, ANOVA, and time series models were covered. Last semester I took Rutgers’ Intermediate Statistical Analysis and found it more challenging. This could have been due to the seven year absence of statistical learning in my life up until this point.
Introductory Computing for Statistics was a five week pass/fail introductory SAS coding class. I showed up for the first two weeks before feeling comfortable enough to skip the rest. It’s a unique coding language compared to R, Python and C++. Its outputs are aesthetically pleasing. I hear it’s dying to software that’s free. I hear it’s holding on for the same reason, that it isn’t open source.