Welcome to APTS Week 4 Online!

This webpage contains important information concerning the APTS week. Please do read it carefully.

Week's resources

Written materials for the week can be found on the resources webpage.

Video materials will be available through the Team created for the APTS week, see "Accessing the meetings and video lectures", below.

IT Preparation for the APTS Week

The APTS week will take place on the MS Teams platform. If you are not from Warwick, you will receive an email with personal details to register your personal Warwick IT account. Warwick students should use their usual ITS account.

All meetings of the APTS and video lectures will be made available via the MS Teams platform. We suggest you read carefully the page about accessing Teams at Warwick. While you can access the MS Teams platform via a web browser, we strongly recommend that you use the desktop version of the application, which you can download here.

You might already be familiar with MS Teams. If this is not the case, this short introductory video will be helpful, and there are more detailed video tutorials if you are interested.

Accessing the meetings and video lectures

You will be added to a Team called "APTS Week 4 2020--2021" that will be private to all Week 4 participants. You should receive a notification about this, but if this is not the case, you will see the Team by clicking on the "Teams" icon at the left of the MS Teams application.

If you have difficulties accessing the MS Team of the APTS week, please look at the FAQ regarding accessing the MS Team for APTS Week 4.

Draft Timetable

Click on the image below to see the draft timetable of synchronous (live) events. These consist of academic sessions (problem classes, computer labs and discussion sessions). You are expected to study the video and written materials during the week, outside the live events. The pdf time table is also available here - Time table PDF.

Module details

The two modules taught during the week are Design of Experiments and Studies (Dave Woods) and Statistical Machine Learning (Louis Aslett). Lectures for both modules will be pre-recorded, with live discussion sessions and labs.

In preparation, you can look at the following introduction to R Programming for statistics. Please read through this material if you are unfamiliar with R.

Teaching plans for Design of Experiments and Studies

This module covers the fundamentals of design of experiments, factorial designs, computer experiments, and optimal designs. Recorded videos are available that cover these topics, along with notes and two computer practical worksheets.

There will be live lecture discussion sessions at 11.00-11.30 on 13th, 15th and 17th of September. You should aim to watch video 1 before the first discussion session, videos 2 and 3 before the second discussion session, and all the remaining videos before the final session.

There will also be two computer labs, at 11.00-12.00 on 14th and 16th of September. The first lab relates to material from videos 2 and 3, and the second lab to videos 5 and 6; you should aim to have watched those videos before the relevant lab sessions. These sessions are provided to give you dedicated time to complete the two computer worksheets and ask questions of the module lecturer. You are encouraged to make arrangements — if possible — to have access to a computer with R installed for taking part in the labs. In preparation, you can look at the following introduction to R Programming for statistics (http://portal.stats.ox.ac.uk/userdata/ruth/APTS2013/APTS.html). Please read through this material if you are unfamiliar with R.

Teaching plans for Statistical Machine Learning

This module provides an introduction to statistical machine learning, including learning theory, local methods, error estimation, hyperparameter tuning, and the current state-of-the-art in classical machine learning methodology with trees, forests and boosting. There are video lectures, extensive notes including live code and computer labs to introduce machine learning pipelines.

There will be either a Q&A session or computer lab each afternoon, giving you an opportunity to clarify or just discuss the material with the lecturer. There are 5 core chapters to the notes (Ch 3 -- 7) with additional surrounding material, so aiming to complete a Chapter each day, plus some background reading which is extensively cited, would be a reasonable aim.

More background and introduction about the course is provided within the notes.

There is a set of preliminary notes that you should look through before starting the lectures.

APTS expects all participants to abide by the codes of conduct of the University of Warwick noting in particular the acceptable use policy. APTS reserves the right to cancel any registration in the event of violation of said codes of conduct.

Privacy Notice

Please note that for the duration of its existence your Warwick IT account will have your full name associated with it and this will be visible to all University of Warwick staff members. Your name will be visible in any Microsoft Teams event in which you participate. A full privacy statement can be viewed here.