STA 35C - Statistical Data Science III, Fall 2026

Course Information

Instructor: Dogyoon Song (dgsong [at] ucdavis [dot] edu)

Teaching Assistant: Qiqi Liu (qqiliu [at] ucdavis [dot] edu)

Lectures: Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, 9:00 AM–9:50 AM, Olson Hall 205

Discussions (Labs) are run by TA

Office hours:

Syllabus: link

Canvas: link

Piazza: link

Textbooks: There is one required textbook, which is available online.

Gareth James, Daniela Witten, Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani. An Introduction to Statistical Learning with Applications in R, 2nd edition (2021) [Springer]. link

A tentative list of topics to be covered include:

Supervised learning
- Intro to supervised learning
- Regression
- Classification
- Basic nonparameterics
Model assessment, selection, and inference
- Cross-validation
- Subset selection and regularization
- Multiple hypothesis testing
Unsupervised learning
- Dimension reduction
- Clustering

The students’ performance in this course will be evaluated based on the following:

Before the course begins, students should complete the “Homework 0” for self-assessment; this will not be collected or graded, and no solutions will be provided.

Lecture Day	Topics	Slides	Additional references	HW
Wed, Sep 23	Introduction	Lecture 1	JWHT, Ch 1
Fri, Sep 25	Probability review: basics and conditional probability	Lecture 2		Homework 1 posted; due Thu, October 1
Mon, Sep 28	Probability review: Bayes’ theorem and random variables	Lecture 3
Wed, Sep 30	Statistical learning	Lecture 4	JWHT, Ch 2.1
Fri, Oct 2	Simple linear regression	Lecture 5	JWHT, Ch 3.1	Homework 2 posted; due Thu, October 8
Mon, Oct 5	Multiple linear regression	Lecture 6	JWHT, Ch 3.2 & 7.1
Wed, Oct 7	Qualitative predictors & pitfalls in linear regression	Lecture 7	JWHT, Ch 3.3 & 3.5
Fri, Oct 9	Classification & Logistic regression	Lecture 8	JWHT, Ch 4.1-4.3	Homework 3 posted; due Thu, October 15
Mon, Oct 12	Logistic regression (cont’d) & Classification errors	Lecture 9	JWHT, Ch 4.3-4.4
Wed, Oct 14	Generative models & Linear discriminant analysis	Lecture 10	JWHT, Ch 4.4
Fri, Oct 16
Mon, Oct 19	Midterm 1 (in class)
Wed, Oct 21
Fri, Oct 23
Mon, Oct 26
Wed, Oct 28
Fri, Oct 30
Mon, Nov 2
Wed, Nov 4
Fri, Nov 6
Mon, Nov 9	Midterm 2 (in class)
Wed, Nov 11	No class (Veterans Day Holiday)
Fri, Nov 13
Mon, Nov 16
Wed, Nov 18
Fri, Nov 20
Mon, Nov 23
Wed, Nov 25	No class (Thanksgiving Holiday)
Fri, Nov 27	No class (Thanksgiving Holiday)
Mon, Nov 30
Wed, Dec 2
Fri, Dec 4

Wed, Dec 9	Final exam (8:00–10:00 AM)