Outline of module, list of resources, etc. and a review quiz on computational skills covered in last year's Computational Tools and Environments.

Given that most (all?) of you have selected the Data Mining 1 elective, I thought it might be useful if we start this module with some data mining type activities. Hopefully seeing the python pandas library in both modules will help getting you up to speed with it quickly.

Given that most of the problems that we will study this semester will have a stochastic component we will start with a review core concepts in probability and some of their applications.

Marko chains are models where the system can be in any one of distinct states and we have known, fixed probabilities of transiting between various pairs of states.

Monte Carlo is a class of computational algorithms that are based on random sampling to compute numerical results.