Opinionated Lessons in Statistics by Bill Press
What is this all about?

This is the website for Bill Press' web lectures on statistics, originally given as a course at the University of Texas at Austin, where Bill is a professor in computer science. The associated YouTube channel is called opinionatedlessons.

How do I use this page?

If you just want to watch or sample the lectures, you can go directly to the YouTube page. If you want to dig deeper into the course materials, then use the links to individual lectures below. Each leads to a page with (usually) problems, solutions, class activities, and further things to think about. There are also links to the original lecture slides in PDF and PowerPoint formats.

Is there more?

Yep. When the course was given in 2014, the enrolled students agreed to make their work (homework, individual projects, etc.) available on the web to everyone in the world as a public wiki. The front door for that wiki is here and explains everything. The individual student pages are accessed here. Some students worked harder than others, you'll see! A few students provided some really excellent problem solutions. (You'll have to figure out for yourself which ones.)

Problems accessing the material?

OK, apologies! Those pages that are served by the course wiki are subject to bit rot, because the MediaWiki software and its underlying PHP need to be upgraded from time to time, and Bill doesn't always remember to do this. If you think this is the problem, Google to find Bill Press's email and send him a note. (Sorry, don't send him your statistics questions!)

If you find that some pages in the course wiki are loading slowly it is probably because we now use MathJax for math equation rendering. This is the most foolproof method and should work on all browsers, but it can be slow. Be patient. Your reward on a slow page will be a page with lots of beautiful math! If math is rendering incorrectly on your browser, we apologize but there isn't much we can do.

If the course wiki pages are completely broken, including the links to the individual lecture segments below, then here is your backup: (1) The YouTube links should still work, so you can still watch the lectures. (2) A single kludgy PDF file with much (but not all) of the material available for the individual segments is linked here.

The lecture segments:

Segment 1. Let's Talk about Probability (or YouTube)
Segment 2. Bayes (or YouTube)
Segment 3. Monty Hall (or YouTube)
Segment 4. The Jailer's Tip (or YouTube)
Segment 5. Bernoulli Trials (or YouTube)
Segment 6. The Towne Family Tree (or YouTube)
Segment 7. Central Tendency and Moments (or YouTube)
Segment 8. Some Standard Distributions (or YouTube)
Segment 9. Characteristic Functions (or YouTube)
Segment 10. The Central Limit Theorem (or YouTube)
Segment 11. Random Deviates (or YouTube)
Segment 12. P-Value Tests (or YouTube)
Segment 13. The Yeast Genome (or YouTube)
Segment 14. Bayesian Criticism of P-Values (or YouTube)
Segment 15. The Towne Family - Again (or YouTube)
Segment 16. Multiple Hypotheses (or YouTube)
Segment 17. The Multivariate Normal Distribution (or YouTube)
Segment 18. The Correlation Matrix (or YouTube)
Segment 19. The Chi Square Statistic (or YouTube)
Segment 20. Nonlinear Least Squares Fitting (or YouTube)
Segment 21. Marginalize or Condition Uninteresting Fitted Parameters (or YouTube)
Segment 22. Uncertainty of Derived Parameters (or YouTube)
Segment 23. Bootstrap Estimation of Uncertainty (or YouTube)
Segment 24. Goodness of Fit (or YouTube)
Segment 25. Fitting Models to Counts (or YouTube)
Segment 26. The Poisson Count Pitfall (or YouTube)
Segment 27. Mixture Models (or YouTube)
Segment 28. Gaussian Mixture Models in 1-D (or YouTube)
Segment 29. GMMs in N-Dimensions (or YouTube)
Segment 30. Expectation Maximization (EM) Methods (or YouTube)
Segment 31. A Tale of Model Selection (or YouTube)
Segment 32. Contingency Tables: A First Look (or YouTube)
Segment 33. Contingency Table Protocols and Exact Fisher Test (or YouTube)
Segment 34. Permutation Tests (or YouTube)
Segment 35. Ordinal vs. Nominal Contingency Tables (or YouTube)
Segment 36. Contingency Tables Have Nuisance Parameters (or YouTube)
Segment 37. A Few Bits of Information Theory (or YouTube)
Segment 38. Mutual Information (or YouTube)
Segment 39. MCMC and Gibbs Sampling (or YouTube)
Segment 40. Markov Chain Monte Carlo, Example 1 (or YouTube)
Segment 41. Markov Chain Monte Carlo, Example 2 (or YouTube)
Segment 47. Low-Rank Approximation of Data (or YouTube)
Segment 48. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) (or YouTube)
Segment 49. Eigenthingies and Main Effects (or YouTube)

More Lectures!

Some additional lectures made it into PowerPoint slides, but never got recorded as web lectures. Here are the links:

Segment 15.5. Poisson Processes and Order Statistics (PDF file)
Segment 42. Wiener Filtering (PDF file)
Segment 43. The IRE Lady (PDF file)
Segment 44. Wavelets (PDF file)
Segment 45. Laplace Interpolation (PDF file)
Segment 46. Interpolation On Scattered Data (PDF file)
Segment 50. Binary Classifiers (PDF file)
Segment 51. Hierarchical Classification (PDF file)
Segment 52. Dynamic Programming (PDF file)

Thanks for visiting!