Abstract: 

This course aims to give a gentle introduction to the ideas behind some of the standard algorithms used in predictive analytics. The goal is to dispel the "magic" around common methods, such as lasso, logistic regression, naive bayes and others. The workshop will consist of a combination of programming (with R) and lectures. If you've ever wondered how these algorithms work, then this session is for you.

Bio: 

Dr. Colin Gillespie is Senior lecturer (Associate Professor) at Newcastle University, UK. His research interests are high performance statistical computing and Bayesian statistics. He is regularly employed as a consultant by Jumping Rivers and has been teaching R since 2005 at a variety of levels, ranging from beginners to advanced programming.