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Course materials. Your main point of reference will be the scribe notes prepared by your
classmates (see below). As a reference on many probability topics we will also use:
Introduction to Probability Lecture Notes, by Dimitri P. Bertsekas and John N. Tsitsiklis.
This is posted as a PDF file on the course Canvas page.
I will also draw on All of Statistics: A Concise Course in Statistical Inference by Larry
Wasserman. You should not feel obligated to buy this. It is entirely optional. As the
material were covering is very standard, basically any intermediate probability/statistics
textbook can be used as a supplement.
Software. While this is a fairly theoretical course, the homework will sometimes include
some simulation or data-analysis exercises. These are all doable in Excel, but you can also
use R, Stata, Matlab anything youre comfortable with.
Assignments, exams and grading. There are five components to your grade: homeworks
(30%), midterm (15%), final exam (30%), probability in the real world (15%), and scribing
(10%).
There will be three problem sets, worth 10% each. These will be posted to Canvas (along
with their due dates).
There will be an in-class mid-term exam on Thursday, July 27th, worth 15%. The TA session
on the following day will be devoted to going over the mid-term.
The final exam will take place in class on Monday, August 14th, and is worth 30%.
I am also asking everyone to complete a probability in the real world writing assignment,
worth 15% and due on Thursday, August 3rd. This will involve both a written report and a
short (just a few minutes) in-class presentation that Thursday. I will give details on this
assignment in class, but the gist of it is simple: conduct a case study of some company,
organization, person, government, etc. using probability in pursuit of a larger economic,
research, or policy goal. Explain how theyre using probability to do something cool. The
idea is for you to connect the concepts we learn in class to some bigger picture in the world
of applications. I will give examples of this kind of thing in lectures.
Finally, the last 10% of your grade will come from submitting a high-quality scribe report
for a single lecture. I'll explain more about this in class, but the idea is simple: each day,
someone takes detailed notes and makes them available to their classmates. These notes are
supposed to be definitive, by which I mean: comprehensive, mistake-free, and easily
understood by any of your classmates who paid attention that day. You only have to do this
once, but you'll be repaid with a set of high-quality crowd-sourced lecture notes. I'll circulate
a sign-up sheet for scribing on the first day of class. You will e-mail your scribe notes to the
TA before the beginning of class the next day, who will post them in a folder on Canvas for
everyone to use.
Course outline
I. Probability Theory
Introduction: Random experiment. Set operations, Kolmogorovs rules of probability.
Interpretations of probability. Probability and coherence. Basic counting rules.
Joint, conditional, and marginal probability. Rule of total probability. Independence,
compounding, and confounding. Bayes rule.
Random variables and their distribution. Discrete random variables and their PMFs:
binomial, Poisson. Continuous random variables and the CDF/PDF: normal
distribution. Transformations of random variables.
The bivariate normal distribution. Regression to the mean.
Properties of distributions: expectation (mean), variance, higher moments, conditional
expectation, conditional variance, covariance and correlation.