Corso di studio in Economia

The course introduces to the fundamental techniques of statistical learning aimed at building a model for predicting a response variable based on one or more independent variables (or covariates). Special attention will be devoted to computer-based implementation of such techniques using a statistical software and to the interpretation of the analyses' results.

- Knowledge and understanding
The student will learn the most common methodologies for analyzing a data set together with their implementation through the software R. The student will also be able to interpret the results of the analysis and present them through both visual and numerical summaries.
- Applying knowledge and understanding
The student will have the ability to discuss various methods and techniques for statistical learning.
- Making judgements
The student will be able to select the appropriate statistical method for analyzing a datasets with the support the R software in supervised learning.
- Communication skills.
Students will properly use statistical language to comunicate the results of their findings.

The course is composed of 48 hours of class lectures. Examples and exercises will be dealt with the R language.

Classes are delivered in presence.

The final examination consists in a written test with open-ended questions, some about the interpretation of a data analysis already prepared, some of a more theoretical type about the topics covered in class.

Statistical learning

- Goals

- Accuracy vs. interpretability

- Bias-variance trade off

Linear regression

- Simple linear regression

- Multiple linear regression

- Discussion and comparisons

Classification

- Logistic regression

- Linear discriminant analysis

- Discussion and comparisons

Validation and resampling

- Cross-validation

- The bootstrap

Model selection and regularization

- Subset selection

- Shrinkage methods (ridge, lasso)

- Dimension reduction

Non-linear models

- Polynomial regression

- Regression Splines

- Generalized additive models