Statistics 151a: Linear models
UC Berkeley, Spring 2026
| 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 | Asymptotics and consistency | Lab (review) | |
| Feb 27 | Friday | Lecture | ——– | Quiz 1 | |
| Mar 2 | Monday | Lecture | Heteroskedasticity and grouping | ||
| Mar 4 | Wednesday | Lecture | Model selection and F-tests | Lab 5 | |
| Mar 6 | Friday | Lecture | The bootstrap | ||
| Mar 9 | Monday | Lecture | Unit 3: Regularization and machine learning | Splines and basis expansions | |
| Mar 11 | Wednesday | Lecture | Ridge regression | Lab 6 | |
| Mar 13 | Friday | Lecture | Lasso regression | HW 2 | |
| Mar 16 | Monday | Lecture | Cross validation and model selection | ||
| Mar 18 | Wednesday | Lecture | Conformal intervals | 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: Criticism and diagnostics | Outliers and leverage | |
| Apr 1 | Wednesday | Lecture | The influence function | Lab 7 | |
| 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 | Logistic regression | |
| Apr 15 | Wednesday | Lecture | Poisson regression | Lab 8 | |
| Apr 17 | Friday | Lecture | Nonlinear least squares | HW 4 | |
| Apr 20 | Monday | Lecture | Random effects models | ||
| Apr 22 | Wednesday | Lecture | Hierarchial modeling | Lab (review) | |
| Apr 24 | Friday | Lecture | Hierarchial modeling | Quiz 4 | |
| Apr 27 | Monday | Lecture | Unit 6: Special topic | TBD | |
| Apr 29 | Wednesday | Lecture | TBD | 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