Statistics 151a: Linear models
UC Berkeley, Spring 2026
Instructors
Instructor: Ryan Giordano

Office hours:
Thur 11am-12pm (389 Evans)
Tues 4pm-5pm (on Zoom)
rgiordano@berkeley.edu
pronouns: He / him
Office: 389 Evans Hall
GSI: Danat Dusinbekov

Office hours:
Wed 1pm-3pm,
Mon 12pm-2pm (both in 428 Evans Hall)
danat@berkeley.edu
pronouns: He / him
Please reach out to Danat if you need to be manually added to BCourses.
Schedule
Lectures will be held on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 9–10am in Davis 534. The first lecture will be on Jan 21st, and the last will be on Friday May 1st.
Labs will be held on Wednesdays from 11 am – 1 pm and 3–5 pm in Evans 340.
Materials
Unelss otherwise noted, the primary materials for the course are the lecture notes, which will be posted to the course website in advance of class. The following textbooks are useful supplementary texts and are all either freely available online or available electronically through the UC Berkeley library:
- SMT: Statistical Models: Theory and Practice Freedman
- LME: Linear Models and Extensions Ding
- ISL: An Introduction to Statistical Learning James, Witten, Hastie, Tibshirani
- VDS: Veridical Data Science Yu, Barter
- ETM: Econometric Theory and Methods Davidson, MacKinnon
Other books of interest to the class are
- FPP: Statistics Freedman, Pisami, Purves
- RDS: R for Data Science, Wickham, Grolemund
- ROS: Regression and other Stories Gelman, Hill, Vehtari
Linear algebra review materials
Basic linear algebra is a serious prerequisite for this course. You can find a summary of useful review materials here.
R programming review materials
This course will be conducting in the R programming language, and basic proficiency is assumed. Here are some useful review materials:
Course Calendar
The following schedule is subject to change.
| Date | Day | Note | Unit | Topic | Assignment |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 21 | Wednesday | Lecture | Introduction | Class policies | Lab 0 |
| Jan 23 | Friday | Lecture | Real-world questions | ||
| Jan 26 | Monday | Lecture | Inference and probability | ||
| Jan 28 | Wednesday | Lecture | Prediction and uncertainty | Lab 1 | |
| Jan 30 | Friday | Lecture | Linear algebra review | HW 0 | |
| Feb 2 | Monday | Lecture | Unit 1: Multilinear regression | Simple linear regression | |
| Feb 4 | Wednesday | Lecture | Multilinear regression | Lab (review) | |
| Feb 6 | Friday | Lecture | ——– | Quiz 0 | |
| Feb 9 | Monday | Lecture | Paths to the least squares objective | ||
| Feb 11 | Wednesday | Lecture | Transforming the regressors | Lab 2 | |
| Feb 13 | Friday | Lecture | Transforming the response | ||
| Feb 16 | Monday | Administrative holiday | |||
| Feb 18 | Wednesday | Lecture | Unit 2: Testing and inference | Confidence intervals review | Lab 3 |
| Feb 20 | Friday | Lecture | The multivariate normal | HW 1 | |
| Feb 23 | Monday | Lecture | Z and T tests | ||
| Feb 25 | Wednesday | Lecture | Model selection and F-tests | Lab (review) | |
| Feb 27 | Friday | Lecture | ——– | Quiz 1 | |
| Mar 2 | Monday | Lecture | Asymptotics and heteroskedasticity | ||
| Mar 4 | Wednesday | Lecture | Misspecification | Lab 4 | |
| Mar 6 | Friday | Lecture | Statistical and practical significance | ||
| Mar 9 | Monday | Lecture | Unit 3: Regularization and machine learning | Canceled class | |
| Mar 11 | Wednesday | Lecture | Statistical and practical significance | Lab 5 | |
| Mar 13 | Friday | Lecture | Splines and basis expansions | HW 2 | |
| Mar 16 | Monday | Lecture | Bayesian estimators | ||
| Mar 18 | Wednesday | Lecture | Ridge regression | Lab (review) | |
| Mar 20 | Friday | Lecture | ——– | Quiz 2 | |
| Mar 23 | Monday | Spring break | ——– | ||
| Mar 24 | Tuesday | Spring break | ——– | ||
| Mar 25 | Wednesday | Spring break | ——– | ||
| Mar 26 | Thursday | Spring break | ——– | ||
| Mar 27 | Friday | Spring break | ——– | ||
| Mar 30 | Monday | Lecture | Unit 4: How regression can go wrong | Outliers and leverage | |
| Apr 1 | Wednesday | Lecture | The influence function | Lab 6 | |
| Apr 3 | Friday | Lecture | Regression to the mean | HW 3 | |
| Apr 6 | Monday | Lecture | The FWL theorem | ||
| Apr 8 | Wednesday | Lecture | Omitted variable bias | Lab (review) | |
| Apr 10 | Friday | Lecture | ——– | Quiz 3 | |
| Apr 13 | Monday | Lecture | Unit 5: Generalizations | Canceled class | |
| Apr 15 | Wednesday | Lecture | Logistic regression | Lab 7 | |
| Apr 17 | Friday | Lecture | Poisson regression | HW 4 | |
| Apr 20 | Monday | Lecture | Nonlinear least squares | ||
| Apr 22 | Wednesday | Lecture | Random effects models | Lab (review) | |
| Apr 24 | Friday | Lecture | Hierarchial modeling | Quiz 4 | |
| Apr 27 | Monday | Lecture | Unit 6: Miscellaneous topics | Bootstrap | |
| Apr 29 | Wednesday | Lecture | Lasso and sparsity | Lab (projects) | |
| May 1 | Friday | Lecture | TBD | HW 5 | |
| May 4 | Monday | Lecture | Final projects | ||
| May 6 | Wednesday | Lecture | Lab (projects) | ||
| May 8 | Friday | Lecture |
Unelss otherwise noted, the primary materials for the course are the lecture notes, which will be posted to the course website in advance of class. The following textbooks are useful supplementary texts and are all either freely available online or available electronically through the UC Berkeley library:
- SMT: Statistical Models: Theory and Practice Freedman
- LME: Linear Models and Extensions Ding
- ISL: An Introduction to Statistical Learning James, Witten, Hastie, Tibshirani
- VDS: Veridical Data Science Yu, Barter
- ETM: Econometric Theory and Methods Davidson, MacKinnon
Other books of interest to the class are
- FPP: Statistics Freedman, Pisami, Purves
- RDS: R for Data Science, Wickham, Grolemund
- ROS: Regression and other Stories Gelman, Hill, Vehtari