stats-minor-iitb

Just a brief overview of Minor program in Applied Statistics offered by IIT Bombay

View project on GitHub

Statistics Minor in IIT Bombay

List of Courses

  • SI422 - Probability Theory
  • SI402 - Statistical Inference
  • SI422 - Regression Analysis
  • SI404 - Applied Stochastic Processes
  • SI527 - Introduction to Derivative pricing

Motivation

  • Maths but not too much maths
  • Good fit for almost all of the students
  • A good minor if you are planning to go more on data analysis domain

What I learnt

  • A lot of good insights for probability distributions
  • Some of the more mathematical view towards the popular machine learning tools and regression
  • How to test a data driven hypothesis

Someone should have told me

  • Compulsory attendance in most courses
  • Don’t expect the top grades as pretty competitive
  • Always complete this minor, else those courses in general won’t give grade to tag as Institute Elective.
  • It wasn’t taught on slides so you have to make notes. Though some of the prof did share notes.
  • SI422 runs in alternate year as minor. It ran as minor in 2020 spring. In the rest years, it runs but not in minor slot. There maybe issue with permissions if you want to sit in them.
  • You need to do only one of SI404 or SI527 to complete the minor.

Course-wise brief intro

  • Probability theory is majorly about defining what a probability distribution is. Slightly off topic, but see Bertrand paradox. Also, a brief overview of many famous probability, expectation of random variable, and some special properties and inequalities. This is like a data analysis course, but some more content about mathematical definition of Probability field and what probability is.

  • Statistical Inference was more indepth analysis on Random Variables and expectation, along with hypothesis testing and Estimations like maximum likelihood and best estimators.

  • Regression Analysis tells a statistical story about linear regressions specially focussing of scoring the regression and applying hypothesis testing on them.

  • Applied Stochastic Processes is a side topic in some way which focusses specially on Markov Chain and how to represent them along with doing analysis like its stationary state.

  • Introduction to Derivative pricing wasn’t done by me so I don’t have any clue.

Conclusion

This minor is an easy pick for someone who is planning to do something later on in analysis side. But this course doesn’t teach anything special that you can’t learn through materials available online. But okay, that works against every course. So, if you don’t have any strong liking for other minor, and you have a good grade till date, this minor is a good place to start learning without much effort and mostly last day exam preparation.

Thanks for reading. For any more clarification, please drop an issue here