1.5 Goals for the Course

I have three high level goals — that by the end of the semester, students should be able to

1. Run regressions and be able to interpret them (this includes even complex regressions) and also be able to think through which regression you ought to run

2. Use data in order to be able to predict outcomes of interest

3. Be able to think clearly about when statistical results can be interpreted as causal effects.

In order to make progress towards these three goals, we also will need to learn about two additional topics:

• Statistical Programming

• Probability and Statistics

We’ll start the course off talking about these two topics. Perhaps this will be review material for some of you, but I have found that it is worth it to spend several weeks getting everyone on the same page with respect to these topics.